Re: [gentoo-user] Symlinked directories and rsync

[Mick]

On Saturday, 19 August 2017 06:33:27 BST John Covici wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:56:55 -0400,
>
> Walter Dnes wrote:
> >   I've RTFM'd, and it looks like there is no way to get rsync to copy
> >
> > over symlinked directories as symlinks.  E.g. I build Pale Moon browser
> > from source for 3 machines at home.  I prefer downloading the source
> > once and symlinking to it from 3 different working directories.  I also
> > have a personal project where I analyze the same text data files in 3
> > different ways.  It makes things so much simpler to use the same code,
> > with different runtime parameters.  So I symlink the main data directory
> > to 3 working directories.  Even "better" (or worse) I've got a situation
> > where I symlink directories to... other symlinked directories.  Yes;
> > symlinks pointing to symlinks work, even for directories.
> >
> >   Unfortunately, rsync will not create a symlink where appropriate, but
> >
> > will de-reference the symlink, and duplicate multiple gigabytes of data
> > needlessly.  I eventually gave up trying, and made a tarball, and pushed
> > it over to my "hot backup" machine, and extracted it there.  That works
> > OK for the initial setup, but is painfull for "minor incremental"
> > updates.
> >
> >   Am I missing something glaringly obvious, or is this a limitation of
> >
> > rsync?  If so, is there another tool that can copy over symlinked
> > directories properly?
>
> I always use -av which copies simlinks correctly.  -H is necessary to
> copy hardlinks.  If you need it -l also ensures this.

I've also found that 'rsync -a -l' does the job, but other tools exist to 
achieve the same:

https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html

https://linux.die.net/man/1/star (look for the section 'Incremental Backups'

HTH.
-- 
Regards,
Mick