Unexpected behavior with --hard-links and --ignore-existing

[Carlos Carvalho]

Benjamin Pflugmann (benjamin-rsync at pflugmann.de) wrote on 27 December 2011 13:25:
 >Summary: When (repeatedly) running rsync with --hard-links and
 >--ignore-existing, new hard links are copied instead of linked.

Seems natural to me. --ignore-existing does just that: ignores that
files already on the destination exist, so it has to copy the new
ones.

To keep the existing versions you might want to do incremental backups
with --link-dest.