Backup Question, Preserving Hard Links

[Kent Borg]

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 11:49:45AM -0400, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
> Try this:
> 
> rsync -rltpuv --delete <source> <target>

Decyphering rsync options, always fun:

  -r  recursive
  -l  symlinks as symlinks
  -t  preserve times
  -p  preserve permisions
  -u  skip files newer on receiver
  -v  verbose

I don't know that those are quite the options I need, but there might
be a good idea in here anyway.

Rync can't do my backup in one chunk (it is too big), and I don't see
how it can do it in smaller chunks and still preserve hardlinks that
point outside a given chunk--but maybe I *can* do the brute force
backup with a pair of tars, and then use rsync to cleanup my
destination of any recently obsoleted files, and do that in small
enough chunks for rsync to handle.  Question then is: can I get the
rsync options right for this cleanup step and will it be faster than
the complete delete I am doing before I do the tar pipe.

Hmmm.


Thanks,

-kb