Sometimes in the process of transferring files from one server to another server, most Webmasters experience an error such as "rsync symlink operation not supported".
Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to fix rsync command related errors.
In this context, we will look into the different causes of this rysnc error and how to fix it.

Different causes and fixes of "rsync symlink operation not supported" error?

In this guide, we will be looking into different causes of this rsync error to occur. Also, our Support Experts have provided their respective solutions for these causes.

1. Cause: NAS overwriting the settings when restarted.

Solution: We add the option "Unix extensions = yes" to the receiving server. Then we restart samba there and mounting share with cifs correctly handles permissions and symlinks.

2. Cause: Windows file systems like FAT32 and NTFS do not support symlinks.

Solution: We use a Linux formatted destination drive (ext2 or ext3). Or else we use the -d option with tar to create a differential backup.

3. Cause: Symbolic links are supported with the cifs vfs but only to servers, such as Samba (versions greater than about 2.2.5), that support the "CIFS Unix Extensions."

Solution: We resolve this by modifying the CIFS mount options and include nosetuids,noperm.

4. Cause: Protocol version

Solution: We enable symlinks with SMB3 by adding the mfsymlinks option. We do it by running the following mount command;

sudo mount -t cifs //ip.add.re.ss/share_name /path/to/mount -o username=hostusername,vers=3.0,uid=clientusername,gid=clientgroupname,soft,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,mfsymlinks

5. Cause: Running docker-sync-stack start using rsync

Solution: In order to resolve this we try to include -L within the sync_args options of the docker-sync.yml.

[Need additional support in fixing rsync errors? – We are available to help you today.]