rsync on a mac - trouble with aliases

[Matt McCutchen]

On 1/31/07, js_spamfree-rsync at yahoo.com <js_spamfree-rsync at yahoo.com> wrote:
> secondly, i have a number of .dmg files kept on my master imaging server that
> need to be backed up off-site in the various schools around the district.  not
> all the images go to every school, and i'm trying to avoid having multiple
> copies of the same image on the master.  what i did was to set up directories
> for each location and place aliases of the images to go to each location in
> that directory.

Aliases are treated specially by the Mac OS X Finder, but they look
like empty regular files through the POSIX filesystem interface that
rsync uses, which would explain why rsync would create empty files on
the destination.  Use symlinks instead of aliases; you can create
symlinks at the Terminal with "ln -s".  I'm glad to see you're passing
--copy-links.

Matt