Comment 8 for bug 1384503

It's an ongoing problem with rsync that's been around for about 10 years or so.

Compressed files transferred with -z fail on occasion - though once you find a file that fails, that file will always fail
I even use --skip-compress=bz2 but that doesn't work either

Last time I got it was ... today.

1.6G -rw-rw-r-- 1 1004 1004 1.6G Dec 14 14:59 log.bz2

Wed Dec 16 07:01:01 AEDT 2015
receiving incremental file list
log.bz2
inflate returned -3 (0 bytes)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at token.c(557) [receiver=3.1.0]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (163300 bytes received so far) [generator]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(226) [generator=3.1.0]
Wed Dec 16 07:02:01 AEDT 2015

Same LTS version as above post

rsync:
  Installed: 3.1.0-2ubuntu0.1
  Candidate: 3.1.0-2ubuntu0.1
  Version table:
 *** 3.1.0-2ubuntu0.1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.1.0-2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages