Re: [PATCH for testing] cow behaviour for hard links

["Jörn Engel" <joern@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de>]

On Mon, 15 March 2004 07:45:58 +0000, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > Or did you mean the problem of tar backups growing *much* larger than
> > > the real filesystem?  Yes, tar becomes useless for backups then. :)
> > 
> > Yep, this is what I meant.
> 
> A different but related problem: rsync cannot backup my kernel
> development directory from one hard disk to another, because it
> contains lots of kernel trees mostly hard linked to each other.  rsync
> falls over, trying to keep track of the roughly half a million links.
> 
> You might see similar problems trying to backup a strongly "copyfile"'d
> filesystems.

And both are easily fixable, if you don't mind using 16 bytes of RAM
per inode.  At least for rsync this should be a piece of cake compared
to the amount of memory already used. :)

Jörn

-- 
When in doubt, use brute force.
-- Ken Thompson