[LBo] Re: Links again...

[Anerobe]

Randy Kramer wrote:

>> Thus you have "real files" (since hardlinks are indistinguishable(?)
>> from the "original") and save tons of diskspace.
> 
> I've heard of schemes like that before (maybe in a different context, and
> I won't immediately recall what it was except that it was a way to do
> backups using hard links (for files that haven't changed, I guess), but
> that's not really a backup, is it?
> 
> I mean, it might guard against some things--oops wait, I get it (I
> think)--this works if you already have a backup (you backed the files/tree
> up yesterday, for example), and today you backup the same tree
> again--within the
> backup, hard links pointing to the backed up files  that haven't changed
> would seem to be fine (barring somehow losing that original backup
> set)--what
> you wouldn't want (doh!) is hard links to your existing original files. 
> (And doh, that wouldn't work anyway, because the backup is (almost
> certainly) on another device/partition, and (as was stated) hard links
> won't work "across" partitions.)

One the other hand... if you make daily backups to a different partition...
for example:

BkMonday <--Monday's backup file on /mnt/bakup
BkTuesday <--Tuesday's backup file on /mnt/bakup
BkWednesday <--Wednesday's backup file on /mnt/bakup
...

Unchanged files on Tuesday's backup could simply be hardlinked to the
BkMonday version's inode on the backup partition... and so on...

Anerobe