Thanks for the reply, Jason.

To quote the GNU tar manual, Section 8.6, "tar's way of handling multiple
hard links to a file places only one copy of the link on the tape, but the
name attached to that copy is the only one you can use to retrieve the file;
cpio's way puts one copy for every link, but you can retrieve it using any
of the names."

It seems to me that hard links are definitely supported in two other basic
backup programs.  This is why I am surprised that NetWorker does not go to
the filesystem level.  I guess I'll have to investigate other options for a
NetWorker backup of my ext3 hard linked rsync backups.

Charles

On 2/11/05 5:00 PM, "Jason Koelker" <jkoelker AT rackspace DOT com> wrote:

> Since hard links share the same target inode as the "real file", they
> appear to be files as well.
> 
> As far as I know, NetWorker does not go onto the filesystem level, and
> relies on the filesystem to tell it what each file is.  Using hard links
> for "backup" does not make sense, since each "file", the real file and
> the link file, will be obliterated if something happens to the
> underlying inode(s).
> 
> Pretty much everything should be able to deal with sym-links and if you
> just want a file to appear in 2 locations, they are the way to go.
> 
> When NetWorker backs up a symlink, it backs up the definition of the
> link, not the target file, so when its restored it is still a sym-link
> and not a real file.
> 
> Have a good one!
> 
> Jason
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 13:52 -0500, Charles Gruener wrote:
>> I tried searching the archives before posting this question, but I wasn't
>> able to locate anything.  If
>> this is a duplicate question, I apologize in advance.
>> 
>> I have a backup schedule utilizing rsync to create hard links on an ext3
>> filesystem.  This saves a
>> great amount of space locally.  However, when backing up to the main server
>> via the NetWorker
>> client, all of the hard links are copied in full.  The redundancy is killing
>> the backup time since I'm
>> tranferring approximately 90% more data than necessary.
>> 
>> Does NetWorker support hard links?  Is there an option I may be missing to
>> turn this feature on?
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
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