Backup & Recovery (Rsync/Tar/Dd)

Stop your backups from blowing up when a file disappears

🧩 The Challenge

You know that feeling when you set off a massive rsync job over night, only to come back to a pile of exit codes because a temp file vanished halfway through the transfer? It’s infuriating to realize your entire backup script aborted because of some ephemeral junk that doesn’t even matter.

💡 The Fix

Throw in the ignore-missing-args flag so rsync just skips the ghosts instead of screaming at you and quitting the whole process. Your backups will actually finish, and you can deal with the actual errors later.

rsync -av --ignore-missing-args --delete /source/ /destination/

⚙️ Why It Works

This tells the process to keep trucking if it encounters a file that was present during the initial scan but went poof before the transfer actually started. Most of the time these are just transient log rotations or temp files that you don’t care about anyway.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Always pair this with –log-file so you have a paper trail of what it skipped, just in case you ever need to hunt down a missing file.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/20/2026