What is GVFS? I get permission denied when I rsync. Why?

[Roasted]

When I rsync my home directory to a spare hard drive in my system, it immediately comes up with something about gvfs and permission denied.

Why? Is that bad? Should I ignore it? Is GVFS a new thing in Hardy? I don't recall it in Gutsy... and I've had the same rsync setup for the last 2-3 years...

[Roasted]

so, I'm reading GVFS is new to Hardy. I assume that it's not important that GVFS gets rsynced when I run my script. Should I throw in an exclude tag so I don't get this error?

[buntunub]

GVFS

Its not a new Hardy thing. Its a new GNOME thing.

[Roasted]

Okay... so... how do I deal with this so my rsync is not effected (or kicking out any errors to me)??

I want to run my rsync command without it barking at me. What can I do?

[gwi]

I have a directory entry in a home directory that looks like this when listed with ls -la:

d?????????  ? ?      ?          ?                ? .gvfs

In another user's home directory it looks normal, and has the user as owner and primary group.

The directory entry shown above is inaccessible, even by root. rsync shows the following:

rsync: readlink "/home/username/.gvfs" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(977) [sender=2.6.9]

Why is that directory entry there, why does it look so strange, and how can I fix it?

[mannheim]

When I rsync my home directory to a spare hard drive in my system, it immediately comes up with something about gvfs and permission denied.

Why? Is that bad? Should I ignore it? Is GVFS a new thing in Hardy? I don't recall it in Gutsy... and I've had the same rsync setup for the last 2-3 years...

In Hardy, when a user has a gnome session running, the directory ~/.gvfs is a mountpoint for some sort of filesystem involving fuse. Since it is a mountpoint, nothing is actually stored on disk under ~/.gvfs in the filesystem you are backing up, so you can exclude it with some filter rule like "exclude /*/.gvfs". It will be recreated if needed, in my experience.

This is a common problem with fuse-mounted files systems I think: not even root can access them, unless a configuration setting is changed somewhere for the mount. rsync throws up that error even if given the --one-file-system option (so it doesn't descend past the mountpoint).

[Roasted]

So, I can't read/access gvfs. Okay. How can I exclude gvfs from my script so I can avoid attempting to copy it (which inevitably fails anyway). ??

[mannheim]

The syntax depends how you are running it, but if you are backing up all home directories for all users, it could be something like

sudo rsync -ax --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/ /media/big-drive/backup-of-home/

For an individial user:

sudo rsync -ax --exclude='/.gvfs' /home/joe/ /media/big-drive/backup-for-joe/

I'm just typing this live, so I may have mistyped these.

[gwi]

Can someone explain why ls can't even show the directory entry .gvfs normally?

[mannheim]

Can someone explain why ls can't even show the directory entry .gvfs normally?

There is a bug in gvfs, reported in launchpad, which puts it into that state (which I don't understand). When the bug is not showing itself, the usual behavior is:

ls -ld .gvfs
dr-x------ 2 joe joe 0 2008-05-14 08:23 .gvfs    # no problem for owner

sudo ls -ld .gvfs
ls: cannot access .gvfs: Permission denied    # root can't access joe's fuse-mounted filesystem