Backup files with rsync: error 23

Well, because you are running rsync in the verbose mode, you should be able to see in its output where the problem lies. Usually it is a permission denied error.

For example, suppose I want to back up the ~/.gvfs folder:

$ sudo rsync -av /home/arrange/.gvfs /tmp
[sudo] password for arrange: 
sending incremental file list
rsync: link_stat "/home/arrange/.gvfs" failed: Permission denied (13)

sent 12 bytes  received 12 bytes  48.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1060) [sender=3.0.7]

So my advice is to list through the rsync -av output and look for similar errors.

I got this error as well. In my case, rsync threw this error because I passed it a non-existent source directory.