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've been having problems transferring files over a pretty bad connection (I'm trying to upload a file on a cloud server) via rsync.

The rsync essentially hangs after about a minute or so. This is the way I'm trying to perform the upload:

rsync -avz --progress -e "ssh" ~/target.war root@my-remote-server:~/

There is no error message or other info. It simply hangs displaying something like:

7307264  14%   92.47kB/s    0:07:59

Ping-ing the remote endpoint doesn't seem to be loosing packages as far as I see.

My local machine is a Mac.

Any help on how to overcome this problem would be nice. Thank you.

Tudor Vintilescu
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  • Have you tried using "--partial" flag and adding KeepAlives to your SSH: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/68813/24379? BTW, the downvote wasn't mine. – Deer Hunter Sep 08 '14 at 13:42
  • Thank you for the idea. Yes, tried both, seems nothing changed. As a sidenote, my ssh_config is oddly located in /etc/ssh_config, not in /etc/ssh/ssh_config as the man page describes it.. Anyway, tried with explicit config file and still hangs. – Tudor Vintilescu Sep 08 '14 at 13:56
  • Have you tried using `scp` or `sftp` to transfer the file? Is rsync saving enough time on the transfer to be worth the trouble? – Kenster Sep 09 '14 at 11:29
  • What's "pretty bad" about the connection (other than the rsync problem)? You say ping is working. What other problems are you having? Try `scp` with the `-v` option. Maybe it will give you some details on what's going on. – Ryan Babchishin Aug 18 '16 at 02:50

2 Answers2

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Try it without the -z option, you could add -C to the ssh command if you must have compression (otherwise the -e ssh part is not needed as that's the default).

wurtel
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As we cannot know the cause of connection problems, I can suggest the --partial option of rsync. It simply is able to restart an interrupted download/upload.

--partial
By default, rsync will delete any partially transferred file if the transfer is interrupted. In some circumstances it is more desirable to keep partially transferred files. Using the --partial option tells rsync to keep the partial file which should make a subsequent transfer of the rest of the file much faster.

If you want to avoid the possibility of long hanging of connection, you can use the --timeout option:

--timeout=TIMEOUT
This option allows you to set a maximum I/O timeout in seconds. If no data is transferred for the specified time then rsync will exit. The default is 0, which means no timeout.

I prefer mixing these two options, re-iterating the upload/download when I catch the return code nonzero from the rsync command.

Some example rsync return codes: 

 23     Partial transfer due to error
 24     Partial transfer due to vanished source files
 30     Timeout in data send/receive
Echoes_86
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