[Discuss] On-site backups revisited - rsnapshot vs. CrashPlan

[Rich Pieri]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:57:07 -0500
Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, at least as far back as NT 4.0 (I used them via 3rd party tools),
> but as far as I know they've never been supported by the Windows GUI,

Depends on what you mean by "supported". Both GUI and CLI APIs follow
hard links and junctions just fine.

Explorer does not have a fuction for creating links and junctions which
is probably just as well. It would lead to inconsistent behavior
between NTFS and FAT file systems.

In Windows 7, maybe Vista as well, there is a MKLINK command which is
the functional equivalent to the Unix ln command.

> and I find it quite plausible that rsync doesn't support links on
> NTFS, even though it could.

rsync does support hard and soft links on NTFS when compiled with
Cygwin. I'm not sure about rsync compiled with MinGW; I don't use that.


> You get similar weird behavior if you try and use hard links on NTFS.)

That's due to sloppy programming in the application.

-- 
Rich P.