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  • Do you know why tickling these directories should cause your system to fail to boot? Is it a causal relationship or just coincidence? Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 8:56
  • Because the system is constantly accessing these files, and with rsync, its possible that upon reading a file that something else is writing to, the file could get corrupted. Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 9:11
  • There's no way that reading a file will corrupt it. And Linux systems don't mandate reader/writer locks so the act of reading won't prevent writing. You might get a corrupted backup for rsync if the file is being update at the instant the read is happening, but that wouldn't cause a boot failure. Hence my curiousity to understand what's going on. Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 9:36
  • I know it's strange, but a few sources actually say this. I also kept getting this email when I ran commands on the system after rsync backup: cloud7-media : Sep 25 21:43:31 : cloud7 : unable to open /var/lib/sudo/cloud7/3 : Read-only file system ; TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/cloud7 ; USER=root ; COMMAND=smartctl -A /dev/sdc Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 11:57