Issue with hard links, please help!

[Paul Slootman]

On Sat 13 May 2006, Max Kipness wrote:

> I still can't seem to figure out why the hard links are breaking though.
> And now I've noticed that I have similar issues on other server with
> hard links (evidently).

> In one instance, the server has maybe 600mb or so of changes per day,
> and a total of about 19GB total files, yet each incremental directory
> shows 5gb or so when doing a du. So does that mean that there are hard
> links breaking daily? 

Perhaps run rsync with --itemize-changes, so that you can see what
triggers the update.

> Should each day/directory show around 600mb? I definitely don't think
> that for 18GB of data, I should have a total of 146GB of storage total.

How many files are in each day? (I'm thinking about the space needed for
directories.)

> Here are the stats for the last backup. Should the Matched and Literal
> equal the total file size?
> 
> 
> Number of files: 50285
> Number of files transferred: 113
> Total file size: 16191157376 bytes
> Total transferred file size: 4581163348 bytes

The total size is apparently 16GB, so if you're seeing 18GB, then 2GB
are "wasted" somehow (the directories? lots of tiny files that use a
rounded-up block of 4K?)

It also says only 113 files (of 50285 total) were transferred, i.e.
50172 files should have been hard-linked.

4.5GB of file data was transferred, so the number of 5GB you mention
sounds about right.

> And using Rsync 2.6.3 on this one.

Hmm, I don't think that had the --itemize-changes option yet;
you may consider upgrading...


You could of course (right after an rsync run) do a 
"cd newdir; find . -type f -links 1 -print" and then randomly check a
couple and compare all their attributes such as mtime, permissions to
the previous dir. (I still recommend using the --link-dest thing over
using cp -al first.)


Paul Slootman