Cannot remove file: "Structure needs cleaning"
That is strongly indicative of file-system corruption. You should unmount, make a sector-level backup of your disk, and then run e2fsck to see what is up. If there is major corruption, you may later be happy that you did a sector-level backup before letting e2fsck tamper with the data.
If it helps anyone, I had a similar issue (rsync/rsnapshot backups, on an affected file). I posted my problem/solution, here:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2348768&p=13627299#post13627299
SUMMARY:
rsnapshot (rsync) backup error on arch linux x86_64 system; a corrupted, deeply-nested file was throwing that error, also shown when I tried to delete that file:
sudo rm -fR hourly.5/
rm: cannot remove 'hourly.5/snapshot_root/mnt/Vancouver/temp/temp - old/temp - 09 (Dec 07, 2014 - Sep 02, 2015)/a_OLD-gmail/[email protected]/[Gmail]/LINUX/rsync, rsnapshot; Other backups/19.bak': Structure needs cleaning
Here is the problem:
cd mnt/Vancouver/temp/temp\ -\ old/temp\ -\ 09\ \(Dec\ 07\,\ 2014\ -\ Sep\ 02\,\ 2015\)/a_OLD-gmail/[email protected]/\[Gmail\]/LINUX/rsync\,\ rsnapshot\;\ Other\ backups/
ls -l
ls: cannot access '19.bak': Structure needs cleaning
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? 19.bak ## << THAT IS THE PROBLEM!!
[ See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/4b47r2/has_anyone_ever_gotten_structure_needs_cleaning/ ]
My backup drive is /dev/sda1.
sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo fsck.ext4 /dev/sda1 ## << accepted suggested fixes
Rebooted: all seems fine. Went into backups drive, deleted that problematic file:
/mnt/Backups/rsnapshot_backups/hourly.5/snapshot_root/mnt/Vancouver/temp/temp - old/temp - 09 (Dec 07, 2014 - Sep 02, 2015)/a_OLD-gmail/[email protected]/[Gmail]/LINUX/rsync, rsnapshot; Other backups/19.bak
Q.E.D.?!
[Update: yes; that worked: my backups are running normally, again! :-) ]
File systems sometimes are not in order and need cleaning. This can be done by fsck command. But remember, you must run fsck only to unmounted partitions to avoid risk of file corruption.
If your file system is ext4, try running this command :
fsck -AR -t ext4 -y