rsync and hard links

[John]

Please ignore this thread for the moment.

At present, there are no complete copies of the file in question at the 
destination.

I was sure yesterday, but OTOH I can't imagine why existing copies would 
have been deleted. It's not supposed to work that way.

I've been monitoring the situation in screen, and I can't see any 
evidence of multiple copies in the scrollbuffer: either I erased them 
when clearing the screen, or I was dreaming yesterday.

I have suspected the behaviour I thought I saw yesterday, before, but 
there doesn't seem any merit asking anyone to pursue  something that may 
be a figment of my mismemory.

If the problem does exist, it will surface in the near future, subject 
to the Internet not falling over in our neck of the woods.