[K12OSN] Help! 280gigs of one student folder copied recursively into inself

[Calvin Dodge]

On 9/25/06, Jim Christiansen <christiansen_j at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know how this happenned, but I started an scp job of my student
> homes from the old server across to the new server and walked away.  Today I
> have found that the 8 gigs of data has grown to fill the entire 320 gig
> drive, most of it being one student's directory recursively copied into
> itself...

Yep - that's one drawback with scp - it follows symbolic links, rather
than just copying them.

If rsync is available on both machines, it's a better choice for copying.

> The old server drive is failing but I can't see how this could affect the s
> copy...  I did and fschk to get it to reboot before the scp job.

> The new server can not seem to rm -rf the offending folder.  I have been
> waiting about one hour, and still nothing.

Is the hard drive being accessed heavily? If so, then rm is working -
it just has a lot of files to deal with (millions, I suspect). If you
have the user's old directory still available, check the number of
files on it and total space, giving you the average file size.

du -s directory
find directory -type f|wc -l

That's a good guide as to how many files need to be deleted on the new server.

> Is there any other way to get this removed?

You might find it faster to copy all non-/home stuff to another drive,
then rsync /home from the old server (or rsync from the new server,
but leave out the problem directory).

Calvin