Is -R --link-dest really hard to use, or is it me?

I've got a problem for which the combination of -R and --link-dest doesn't seem to be quite enough---and I may have discovered a few small bugs as well; test cases are below. [And if someone has a scheme for doing this that doesn't involve rsync at all, but works okay, I'm all ears as well---I'm n

Rsync error 'unexpected tag 93' when --log-file= parameter is present and run from crontab

L.S. I hope someone can enlighten me on the following phenomenon. When I run rsync (3.0.2 or 3.0.4) from a (SH) script as follows: rsync -vrpth --stats --progress --log-file=/nslu2/rsync.log --log-file-format="%t %i %n%L" --include-from=/nslu2/rsync-files /share/hdd/data/public/Ernst/ 192.168.