I finally bought an SD card for my phone, and I was planning to sync my music library to it with rsync or similar (~40 GB). MTP doesn’t work on my phone, and there are plenty of other quirks as well (it’s complicated), so I thought it would be simple to just put the microSD in my USB adapter thing and copy. But I’m having issues.
rsync will hang on one file after ~100 xfers, then slow down and eventually die after ~30 mins. Corrupts the filesystem on the SD card a little bit so you can’t eject it cleanly. Running it again isn’t any faster for the files already transferred (it seems to be writing them again in full), so it’s not even saving any time. Am I doing it wrong? Do I need to artificially throttle the write speed, or break it up into smaller transfers? I’d rather not…
Links to card and reader if it helps. I’ve had the reader for a while, it’s not broken in any obvious way.
If anyone has experience with this or tips, it’s appreciated.
Limiting the speed below 10 MB/s with --bwlimit=9MiB seems to work. Knowing the card is rated for minimum 10 MiB/s write made it pretty easy to pick the cutoff.
I always get a little nervous about huge file transfers, though, and this isn’t helping my paranoia. Shouldn’t the card just block if it can’t finish the writes fast enough? Makes me curious where the point of failure is. I’ll probably just put this command in a script so I don’t have to figure this out from scratch again.
Edit: up to letter R, hasn’t stumbled yet I think. Fingers crossed! I just wanna copy some files, maaaan.
Update: It choked on a few tracks from Pink Floyd but finished the transfer. I just deleted the directory, fsck says it’s clean. Re-running rsync, iotop reveals that it is indeed reading (not writing) to the card; it’s just not as fast as I expected. I’m taking the speed limit off for these subsequent runs since there’s not much to write.
around 55GB of 192kb/s mp3s here. I never use sync managers because of stuff like you’re experiencing.
Windows Explorer or whatever file manager your Linux distro uses tends to do such file transfers a lot better. Break it up into smaller parts if you’re nervous about transferring it all in one go.