[Dirvish] move/rename files/folders

[Dave Howorth]

Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> # from Marco Jackel
> # on Thursday 21 June 2007 01:43 am:
> 
>> what happen if I move or rename files or folders in a directory that
>> gets backuped every night. Are those "new" files/folders hardlinked to
>> the existing ones in the backup, too?
> 
> No.  The backup linkage is by-name only.

I'm not sure that's the whole story. dirvish does preserve hardlinks
within backups, and of course it makes hardlinks between backups.

So if you have a file, make a hard link to it and then delete the
original link (a.k.a. file), I think dirvish would link to the same
object in the backup. So I think there's a fair chance that a
rename/move in the same filesystem will hardlink. Depends on the
filesystem type as well as other variables.

OTOH, there's at least one situation where I expected Dirvish to
preserve hardlinks where it didn't. (actually it was rsync rather than
dirvish that didn't behave as I expected). I now use rdiff-backup for
that specific case, because it uses librsync rather than rsync.

Sorry, I don't have time to check the specifics in this case. You'll
need to do your own experiments, Marco, but it's worth a try. Let us
know what happens.

Cheers, Dave