[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://joeyh.name/"
 ip="209.250.56.191"
 subject="comment 1"
 date="2014-04-20T16:52:15Z"
 content="""
Last time rsync seemed to fail like this it was really the remote git-annex-shell failing on an encoding problem:
[[!commit 0b12db64d834979d49ed378235b0c19b34e4a4d6]]

It seems I would need to see the transfer info files you moved out of the way to say more. Or you could copy the back, reproduce the problem, find the git-annex-shell command that is being run (using --debug), and see if you can run it on the remote system and reproduce the problem there without rsync in the picture, in order to get the actual error message.
"""]]