I tried to rsync a VM image from one machine to another. Both files already existed, but neither directory was writable by me. I got the following output: vauxhall ok % rsync -avP bmc@172.16.2.67:/var/lib/libvirt/images/acheron.qcow2 /var/lib/libvirt/images/acheron.qcow2 receiving incremental file list rsync: mkstemp "/var/lib/libvirt/images/.acheron.qcow2.7Aipp7" failed: Permission denied (13) 12,887,130,112 100% 23.60MB/s 0:08:40 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1) sent 908,279 bytes received 851,577,844 bytes 1,494,278.92 bytes/sec total size is 12,887,130,112 speedup is 15.12 rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1655) [generator=3.1.1] However, comparing SHA-256 checksums on the two sides showed that the file was not transferred correctly. I suspect --inplace would have fixed the problem, but if rsync can't create the temporary file and that is going to cause it to fail to transfer, it should complain about that before transferring 12 GB of data needlessly.