There have been a lot of posts on the list lately about issues with hard links. It has been very interesting, but I don't understand it very thoroughly. I haven't used hard links for anything yet. I've used symlinks - not for backups, of course - and have seen them get broken or deleted in backups.
Is there a tutorial anywhere that will explain how this works (assuming that the reader understands the basic concepts of backups and knows how to program, but doesn't really understand how to use links to create things like incremental or differential backups)? It seems like there are a lot of fine points to consider, some of which can really bite you if you don't take them into account. I'm working on my own personal backup system using bash and rsync. When it's done it will be pretty good, but it would be *much* better if I rewrote it to have more backup versions using hard links to save space. I am writing my own because (aside from learning a lot) I have only seen two types of backup utilities - those that are very simplistic and won't let me do what I want and those which are enterprise level and I can't figure out how to get them to do anything without extensive study. (I did experiment with areca (I think it uses rsync libraries under the hood) which would probably do everything I want, but I got stuck too many times and couldn't get enough support on their forum to keep going.) TIA Joe -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html