>From TODO: We can also have the case where there are links to a file that are not in the tree being transferred. There's nothing we can do about that. Because we rename the destination into place after writing, any hardlinks to the old file are always going to be orphaned. In fact that is almost necessary because otherwise we'd get really confused if we were generating checksums for one name of a file and modifying another.
>From Mike Rubel's excellent incremental backups HOWTO: <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/#Bugs> As-written, the snapshot system above does not properly maintain old ownerships/ permissions; if a file's ownership or permissions are changed in place, then the new ownership/permissions will apply to older snapshots as well. This is because rsync does not unlink files prior to changing them if the only changes are ownership/permission. Thanks to J.W. Schultz for pointing this out. This is not a problem for me, but slightly more complicated workarounds are possible I'd personally like to see an option to force rsync to break-and-copy any hardlink that pointed outside of the destination tree before doing -any- changes, even metadata. I know that this "breaks" standard hardlink semantics, but it's a desirable breakage for building these nice incremental backup systems :) I'm willing to eat the space taken by duplicating the entire file, since the obvious alternative (using LVM snapshots to preserve -everything- about the previous versions) has its own critical drawback (the danger of running out of space on the snapshot limits how long a given snapshot can stick around on the system). I rooted around in the sources tonight to see if I could easily add such an option (or, at least, as a temporary hack, hardcode the behaviour), but I don't yet have the full flow of the source in my head, so I'm not sure how to make the patch in the spirit of the rest of the code. It looks like I should make the change in generator.c : recv_generator, but I'm not quite sure of the repercussions of "copying" the various sorts of files the link target might be. Actually, I guess I'm unfamiliar enough with hardlinks to not even know what I can hardlink to :) Sorry for rambling... I guess I'm saying I'd love to write this patch with just a tiny bit of guidance :) Thanks! - t. -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
