[Dirvish] Symlinks consume disk space in each snapshot

[Bernd Haug]

Dirk Wessner wrote:
> thanks for this suggestion. I think in my case it would be easier to
> find an exclude pattern that keeps these symlinks from being
> backed up, because they can easily be rebuild.
> I'm just not sure if I'm doing something wrong here or of this
> is the way symlinks are treated by rsync/dirvish.

I just tested that on my UFS disk, which should do normal Unix
semantics:

Symlinks to files work, hardlinks to files work (same inode) but
when I created a hardlink to a symlink, it just followed the link
and made a hardlink to the symlinked-to file.

Seems to be normal, then. Didn't try making my own C program and
directly calling link(2) on the symlink, though.

> To give some more details: I do a backup of student's www-dirs,
> and they got their own phpMyAdmin. To save disk space, I symlinked
> one phpMyAdmin installation to every student's www-home. Only
> the config.inc.php is a "real" file.
> I know that it should somehow be possible to use only one phpMyAdmin
> installation for this, but it worked this way some time now, and
> I didn't made up my mind on this. But this is really OT now.
> Just to explain the many symlinks.

I see your point, we did something similar for a while for TWikis.

Still, maybe asking a sysadmin at a hosting company that runs MySQL
(i.e., "a hosting company" ;-/) might help, that's their bread &
butter after all.

Yours, Bernd