not always making hard links?

Wayne Davison wayned at samba.org
Fri Sep 10 19:36:24 GMT 2004


On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 02:47:28PM +0200, Paul Slootman wrote:
> Yes, I just checked out what -a does exactly.
> Why oh why does -a not preserve hard links?

Because it used to be horribly inefficient in memory usage and in extra
bytes transferred over the wire (it bloated memory use in the receiver
by an entire extra file-list, which was a huge hit for large transfers).
J.W. and I put a lot of work into 2.6.1 to improve both aspects to the
point where it is actually quite efficient now, e.g. it only sends extra
bytes for files that actually have more than one hard-link (not all
files) and memory usage is _way_ down.  It does require a modern rsync
on both ends of the connection for all the improvements to be realized,
of course.

..wayne..


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