rsync not copying files (just folder structure)

Question

I am using rsync on mounted volumes from a NAS box onto my Windows 10 laptop with WSL (Debian). In the Debian shell, I mount the shared drive volumes and run rsync to make sure all of the source files (vol1) exist in the destination (vol2).

rsync -av --ignore-existing /mnt/vol1 /mnt/vol2

After running the command on the destination side I have a complete folder structure, but none of the files themselves were copied over. I directed the results into a file and see that the files were included as part of the output, but they were not actually copied. The same command works from my Mac terminal without issue, but I prefer working on my laptop so really want to be able to do this kind of storage management through WSL.

I think it is a permissions problem with Windows because I get failures on the WSL side:

rsync: mkstemp "filepath" failed: Operation not permitted (1)

Is there a fix for permissions on the WSL side when using SMB mounts? I mount the volumes using

mount -t drvfs X: /mnt/s

Lastly, I do use sudo for the rsync command with the same result in the end.

Answer 1

It sounds like you are running into a manifestation of this. To summarize, the destination drive is mounted as root, so you don't have permissions there. The solution, as described there, is to simply sudo mount -t drvfs X: /mnt/s -o uid=1000,gid=1000 (replacing the 1000 with your uid/gid if they are different).

In trying it myself without the mount options, I was able to reproduce your problem. When I added the mount options to the destination drive, it worked correctly for me.