rsync logging and permission problems

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

Dear People,

I am taking the liberty of asking this here though it is not strictly
about Debian, but I know very many Debian people do use rsync.

I have just started using rsync for backups. I have had a couple of
issues. Note I'm trying to use rsync as user using ssh between two
machines both running Debian GNU/Linux potato (2.2r3). The local machine
is currently running 2.4.6-1 and the remote 2.3.2-1.2.

1) When I run rsync with the vv option, stuff scrolls of my screen faster
than I can read it. I was wondering if there is a logging option I could
use. I didn't see it in the documentation. I can use something like "rsync
-avvz -e ssh localdir/ remotemachine:remotedir/ 2>&1 | less" to look at
the output, piping both standard output and standard error to less.
However, I'm puzzled why lines like "Mail/190 is uptodate" are sent to
standard error. Surely they should be sent to standard output?

2) I am trying to copy the file /var/spool/mail/faheem on the local
machine to /var/spool/mail/faheem on the remote machine. The problem is
that only the file on the remote machine (but not the directory) is owned
by me. rsync first tries to write some other file to /var/spool/mail but
can't. I then used --temp-dir=/tmp and rsync stopped complaining about not
being able to write to /var/spool/mail.  However, it still does not seem
able to write the file correctly to the remote machine (I get error
messages like :rename /tmp/.faheem.Tb4wnj -> /var/spool/mail/faheem :
Permission denied"). I don't understand why this is happening, though.

Can anyone make suggestions about what to do? I would prefer not to run
rsync as root on the remote machine. In any case, I tried to do so and
could not, perhaps because Debian does not allow remote logins as root by
default.

Please cc any reply to me; I'm not on the mailing list. Thanks in advance.

                                  Sincerely, Faheem Mitha.