On Sun, 26 May 2024 20:48:18 +0200
Antony Stone <Antony.Stone@???> wrote:

> On Sunday 26 May 2024 at 20:37:38, Lars Noodén via Dng wrote:
>
> > On 5/26/24 21:27, Antony Stone wrote:
> > > On Sunday 26 May 2024 at 20:08:19, nisp1953 via Dng wrote:
> >
> > >> I am backing up about 34 GB of data. It's small but important.
> > >
> > > In that case I would not even consider incremental backups - I would take
> > > a full backup every day, and write it to a different directory (or even
> > > partition) on the external drive. I cannot imagine you are using disks
> > > smaller than 7 x 34 Gb = 238 Gbytes.
> >
> > Or do something in between via Rsync using the --link-dest option.
> >
> > I've been using rsync(1) with --link-dest comfortably for quite some
> > time now. I use stat(1) and date(1) to find the day of the year from
> > the previous run and point rsync(1) to that.
>
> I do that too, however it does:
>
> a) result in the entire archive of "daily backups" occupying a single file
> system, and
>
> b) greatly benefit from some advance planning when formatting that file system,
> to increase the number of inodes, otherwise you can easily run out of inodes
> well before you run out of space (and then spend quite some time trying to
> understand the misleading error message "no space left on device").
>
> In my case I:
>
> 1. backup my data over the local network to a file system in one partition on
> another machine
>
> 2. copy that data using rsync with hard links to another file system on a
> different partition on the same machine as the backup

Hard links across partitions? Shouldn't that be impossible, because the hard link is just another reference to the same inode?

Alexander