more about links (was Re: A bold idea (Re: Carrying Attributes too Far))

[David Masover <jedi@ninja.dynup.net>]

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Heinz-Josef Claes wrote:

>Am Mo, 2003-12-08 um 21.54 schrieb Boyd Waters:
>  
>
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>>Heinz-Josef Claes wrote:
>>
>>| I think hard linking directories is a very good idea. The should be a
>>| count for the number of hard links and it should be handled like with
>>| normal files. I directly have an application with would have a great
>>| benefit of this kind of hard linked directories, but up to now they are
>>| not available in linux :-(
>>
>>I use
>>
>>mount -o bind path/to/subdirectory path/to/mountpoint
>>
>>as a sort-of "hard-link" directories...
>>
>>    
>>
>Yes, that would look a little bit like a hard link. But I want to use it
>as a possiblity for my backup tool (see below). It makes a backup to
>another hard disk and hard links to files with a contents which is
>already in the backup. If a hole directory had not changed, I could make
>a link to the previous one and that's all. Now I have to mkdir the
>directories and hard link every single file. I could use much less space
>if there were an op
>
If a symlink really won't work for you, have the whole directory be a 
hardlink farm.  Trust me, it's cleaner that way.

My backup system involves using rsync to do that -- first I do a 'cp 
- -al' from the old generation dir to the new one.  Then I rsync over my 
current files.  Only the files that have changed are updated.

If that still isn't enough, use symlinks.  Some things which used to be 
hardlinks on my distro have been changed to symlinks, and I like the change.
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