Comment 6 for bug 1470576

... ok so rsync will create the device dirs. So sam's right.

FWIW when reverting a handoff/rebalance there is no preflight REPLICATE request - the node holding the partition that doesn't belong on that node will just try to rsync it where it goes - no opportunity for 507. If the device's dir does not exist on the target node the remote rsync module will try to create it - so it's important that operation either fail, or is a broken symlink.

I'm not sure if there are any flags/options that rsync might have that would prevent this.

This is yet another of many reasons we need to get in the datapath for object replication (think SSYNC or hummingbird's SYNC)