Re: [Networker] Questions on backing up hard links?

Not surprisingly, it turns out that I was not recovering all theaffected files. If I recover all the files then they are recovered ashard links, same as before, but their inode numbers may differrespectively from the originals as follows:

if I recover them to a different location then they are assigned new,but identical, inode numbers even if the original paths are gone. If Ichoose to rename the recovered files, of course, they will be assignednew but identical inodes. since the originals are still in use. If,however, I remove the original files then the recovered files are giventhe original inode values, assuming those are not in use. If I overwritethen this appears to assign the same inode numbers. If one set of thefiles are gone, but the others are still around, and I recover themissing ones by path then they will be assigned new inodes, but if Iinstread recover both, and I simply answer "Discard recovered file" whenit prompts for the one that still exists then it assigns the same inodesto the ones it recovers.

I also found I can recover 2 or more of the hard links and the inodeswill be preserved depending. For example, if I have three or more hardlinks (link count=3 or more), and I remove all of them, and then Irecover say 2 of the three then they will have the same inodes asbefore, but if one or more of the files still exists, then I noticed Igot different results but could not replicate exactly. Not sure if thebehavior was expected or maybe I just wasn't doing it write withoverwrite versus the file not even existing anymore before recovering?

Anyway, for our purposes if one copy of the files was lost it wouldprobably be easier to just manually recreate the hard links via a shellcommand than to use the recover tool since the shell would be faster andyou don't have to answer "Discard recovered file" when it hits the onesthat still exist. Guess you could overwrite but seems silly to ifthey've not changed.


George

Darren Dunham wrote:

Does it make any sense to back up hard links?
As opposed to what?  Not backing them up?
My testing shows that theyare not recovered as hard links so seems pointless to do so?
Did you try recovering them both in the same session?
You'd haveyour pathnames back, but they would just be copies taking up space, notactual hard links. You'd have to re-create the hard links fromscratch.
I don't think that's correct.  There have been some bugs associated with
it in the past, but hard links should be recovered properly.

I would not expect that you could recover one link to a file and have it
relink to a file already present.  I would expect that if you recovered
multiple links to a file that each would be a link to the same file.


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