Is there a howto/tutorial on backups/rsync that covers the use of hard and soft links?

[Voelker, Bernhard]

Kevin Korb wrote:
> On 01/22/13 18:12, Kevin Korb wrote:
> > That is the old way that pre-dates --link-dest.  Instead of cp -al 
> > daily.02 daily.01 you can do a mkdir daily.01 then an rsync ... 
> > --link-dest=../daily.02 daily.01
> > 
> > Rsync then doesn't need any --delete and you don't bother making
> > any hard links that will eventually be replaced.  Plus the linking
> > happens while rsync is running so it is usually much faster.

> Also, if you put dates and times in the file names instead of .01,
> .02, etc you don't have to do any mv's, you can easily tell when each
> backup was run, and ls can tell you which the newest and oldest are.

Please tell me if I'm wrong, but depending on the scenario,
it has one week point:

I'm using a similar script on some desktop PCs. The problem is,
that - due to the fact that it's a desktop PC - the backup can
be killed during a shutdown ... leaving the last backup uncomplete.
That's not a problem per se, but with the next backup, the missing
files are copied freshly from the source and thus exhausting backup
space.
Therefore, the script I'm using rotates the snapshot *after* a
successful run of rsync.

Have a nice day,
Berny