[SlugBug] rsync / crontab timeouts?

[James Wallbank]

Hello All,

I have lots of users' data to keep safe on the Access Space fileserver. 
So each night I run a cron job that runs a bash script that calls rsync.

The shell script (which is rebuilt every night to take account of new 
users) runs a series of rsync jobs from...

rsync -avz --force --delete /home/abbie /mnt/backup/

...through 450 or so users all the way to...

rsync -avz --force --delete /home/zero /mnt/backup/

Last night I replaced the backup hard disk with a blank one. Thus rsync 
had to do all the backup work in one go - it couldn't skip anything 
already present on the target disk! In the morning at 10 am there was 
apparently no activity, and backups on the new disk were frozen at "markc".

Can any of you think why a cron job might time out? Or has rsync, or 
something else run out of memory? Or is it that the machine simply 
hasn't had enough time to copy 108 Gigs of data across its own bus? (It 
had ten hours before I checked).

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

James
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