rsync suddenly hanging indefinitely during transfers

Question

For the past few years, I have been using an rsync one-liner to back up important folders on my Mac Mini desktop (OSX 10.9, 2.5 GHz i5, 4 GB RAM) to a FreeNAS box (0.7.2 Sabanda

Answer 1

Just had a similar problem while doing rsync from harddisk to a FAT32 USB drive. rsync froze already in less than a second in my case and did not react at all after that ... left it with CTRL+C.

Found out that the problem was a combination of usage of hardlinks on the harddisk and having FAT32 filesystem on the USB drive, which does not support hardlinks.

Formatting the USB drive with ext4 solved the problem for me.