Re: Adding -l option to cp

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 6 February 2011 12:52, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> During the course of discussing this change I actually found a better
> way to do the incremental backup. ÂWhile pax was suggested it has a
> weakness (shared by cp -l) that it turns soft links into hard links in
> the mirrored tree. ÂWhile this is not a problem (rsync will replace it
> with the soft link from the directory being backed up) it is a bit
> kludgey. ÂJoerg actually pointed me to a better way using rsync(1).
> This has the additional benefit of doing both operations in one step.
> Here is an example command that my script now generates.
>
> rsync -aHz --delete --link-dest=/backup/20110205 /backup/TODAY
>
> I considered not adding the option to cp(1) since there is another way
> but there are still a lot of recipes out there that use it and I didn't
> want people to say that NetBSD wasn't suitable for this type of
> backup. ÂI may search out those sites and offer this improvement.

As an aside have you looked at dirvish for the incremental backups?
I've been using it
for a couple of years to backup various machines and it automates the
whole "snapshot
trees of hardlinks", plus retaining different backups for appropriate times...