when does --link-dest create a link?

Jean-Claude Wippler jcw at equi4.com
Sat Apr 26 08:37:10 EST 2003


Hello,

(I found a post in the archives titled "link_dest checks perms despite 
no -p -o or -g" on April 7th, which might be related - not sure...)

I'm trying to get a rotating daily backup going with previous days kept 
as hard links to save on network transfer and disk space.  The plan: on 
day N, rsync to blah/N/, using --link-dest=../<N-1> (modulo 7 or 
whatever).

My test command is:
  rsync -a --delete --link-dest=../1 ~/ 
siepie::gigs/teevie-jcw.backups/2/

When 1/ has data and 2/ is empty, the above command will properly 
create a backup, using the local data from 1/ (yeay!), but the files 
are not hard linked, even though they are identical (uid, mode, and 
all).

I'm running 2.5.6 on both systems (two different Linux distro's).  One 
perhaps significant detail is that uid's differ.  The server-side 
rsyncd.conf file contains "uid/gid" settings to map things for me (user 
names are identical).  What I'm trying to do is ignore uid's, since all 
requests will be from and for a single user in my case.

The point is that I sent the first copy over in the same way as the 
second, i.e. both are sent to siepie:: without altering rsyncd.conf, so 
my expectation was that whatever rsync does with uid's would match on 
both requests?

Is this solvable?  Is there a better way for me to set things up?

(Oh, and btw: rsync is fantastic, as concept *and* as implementation)

-jcw



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