My question begins with: Do I actually have hard links on my disk at all (except for "." and ".." of course)? I'm not sure how I would find that out?
If no, the question is already answered.
If yes, I'd like to adjust my backup routine (currently using rsync -a
) to preserve my hard links. I've seen the option -H
, but the man page worries me with a few statements, e.g.:
-a, --archive
...
Note that -a does not preserve hardlinks, because finding
multiply-linked files is expensive...
-H, --hard-links
...
It does NOT currently endeavor to break already existing hard links
on the destination that do not exist between the source files. ...
Note that rsync can only detect hard links between files that are
inside the transfer set...
So what should I do, if I have hard links on my disk?