why --delete dosen't work in my script?

[Mike Rubel]

> In my backup script I have noticed nothing gets deleted on the remote
> end even though I have --delete and --delete-excluded. Did I miss
> anything obvious here?

Not sure if this applies to you, but...

One thing I noticed about trying to use --delete in combination with -b
--backup-dir is that files do not get deleted if there is already another
hard link to them on the target side.  As I understand it, this is not so
much a bug in rsync as it is a somewhat non-intuitive POSIX behavior in my
operating system (Linux).

Basically, if it can, backup just renames the file instead of copying it.
But on my system, if a and b are both hard links to the same inode,

mv a b

does *not* unlink a!  It has no effect, in fact.

My solution was to make two rsync passes, the first with -b --backup-dir
but no --delete, the second without -b --backup-dir but with --delete.
At some point, though, maybe we should patch rsync to make it do the
intuitive thing in this case.

Does anyone else have experience with this?

Regards,
Mike