Rsync Issue

[ebrke]

I completed an rsync procedure to a flash drive to back up my /home before updating OpenSuSE. Rsync finished normally and I closed the terminal window. Then I noticed that the flash drive was signaling it was still busy. It's been 35 minutes since then and the flash drive still signals it's writing data if I try to unmount it. Anyone have any ideas what may  be going on?

 

Edit: As soon as I posted this, of course, the flash drive stopped. I unmounted, remounted and can't seem to find any problems. Still like to know if anyone can give me any ideas about what happened. Must have taken over 40 minutes after completion of rsync for flash drive to finally stop writing data.

Edited May 23, 2021 by ebrke

[securitybreach]

Hard to say really as there are too many factors.

[ebrke]

Thanks Josh. I don't remember this happening to me before, although I do usually go away and just leave rsync to do its thing. I was monitoring it today since we had a forecast for thunderstorms. I didn't want to risk an upgrade of Suse but thought I could get away with the backup. 

[sunrat]

Possibly rsync wrote all the data to buffers but hadn't completed actually writing to the device. I have several old ones that seem to take an eternity to finish. If you want to ensure the data was written before the command exits, append sync like so:

rsync <rest_of_command> ; sync

 

[ebrke]

Thanks, sunrat, I'll try that next time!

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Elizabeth,

 

What type of flash drive? Do you mean a USB thumb drive type device or do you mean a SSD of some sort? And how are you connecting to your system to do this backup?

 

If you're flash drive was connected to your system via USB, it's not nearly as fast a transfer method as it would be from internal drive to internal drive. Even USB 3.0 isn't going to transfer as fast as an internal data buss.

[ebrke]

3 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

it's not nearly as fast a transfer method as it would be from internal drive to internal drive.

I know, and this hardware is limited to usb 2.0. Just used an empty thumb drive. As sunrat suggested, in retrospect it appeared to be buffering but I'd never had it go on so long before.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

If you rsync'd a lot of data onto that thumb drive via USB 2.0, it would be VERY SLOW to transfer. Been there, done that.

[ebrke]

Usually slow doesn't bother me anymore. I'm getting a lot slower doing stuff myself! It was the weather forecast that had me nervous. I wanted to finish before any t-storms hit. I need to see about a new battery for this laptop--current one is completely shot and I didn't have the option of unplugging for safety.