On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 01:15:48PM -0400, Guy Dallaire wrote:
> 2005/8/30, Graeme Humphries <graeme.humphries AT vcom DOT com>:
> > Guy Dallaire wrote:
> > 
> > >>Perhaps the problem DLE has lots of hard links?
> > >>
> > >>
> > >Hard Links ????
> > >
> > >
> > As opposed to symbolic links. You'll probably want to read up at
> > Wikipedia on the two if you haven't heard about them before:
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link
> > 
> > Hard linking is fairly depricated these days AFAIK, but it's still used
> > in certain circumstances.
> > 
> 
> Yes, thanks. I know about hard links. But how would it impact the size
> or performance of my backups ? And is there a way to find the number
> of HARD links ?

Each time gnutar sees a file with a linkcount > 1, it allocates a
structure to keep track of it, so the file can be correctly relinked
on restore.  If your filesystem has enough of them, you can
run gnutar out of memory.

                        -- JF