mjhjmtu

I'm rsyncing in to a shared web host from a Yosemite client.

I've set up my authorized keys and can ssh in just fine, and scp files over no problem.

When I rsync with the -n (dry-run) option, it lists changed files, no error.

But when I use the same exact command without -n, I get this:

building file list ... done
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (8 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-45/rsync/io.c(453) [sender=2.6.9]

No idea why - I've searched the web for an hour, no clue without any other error message to go by.

Any thoughts?

The server may be returning an @ERROR message, but the client may be misreporting it as a premature EOF instead.

The first step is to figure out what the underlying error is. I suggest you run rsync with simpler flags to see if it works. It's possible that rsync is failing to load libz but it doesn't notice until it's time to compress something.

The second step is to get the Yosemite-side client to tell you something about those 8 bytes it received. If adding enough -v flags doesn't do the trick, I suggest building a newer rsync (e.g. using Homebrew and the homebrew/dups keg). It may tell you something useful that the relatively-old rsync in stock OSX doesn't.

If you don't mind going to the trouble of setting it up, you could set up an rsync daemon on your Yosemite machine, use ssh -R to enable port forwarding back to it, and run the rsync manually on the web host shell, so that it connects to the rsync daemon on your machine. Then its error message will be plain to see.

This question has been asked some time ago but it may help someone.

I just run into the same error msg when syncing to the server. In my case there was an folder missing server side where I wanted to sync to. Creating the folder solved the problem.

I find this happens mostly when copying massive trees. The Mac version connects to the server and then builds the file list. If that takes too long, the server on the other side closes the connection because it is inactive for too long.

The new versions of rsync build the file list incrementally, so start copying almost instantly and the connection never goes idle. The two advantages are:

• No disconnects after waiting for an age for rsync to count millions of files.


• You make progress each time you run the command, even if the network connection is unreliable and disconnects from time-to-time.

Fix this problem on Mac OS X by installing a more up-to-date version of rsync, like with brew: brew install rsync. Upgrading from the Mac OS X default version of 2.6.9 to 3.1.3 fixed that problem.

Make sure the target directory exists on the remote server. rsync can compensate for one level of missing directories, but if more than two levels of directories are missing it will throw the error that you're seeing.