[lbackup-discussion] lBackup and Symbolic Links

[henri]

> Does anyone have any ideas what is happening? Should this work or did I misunderstand?

Essentially, the links are being copied as links. The rsync flag :

	--copy-dirlinks

Potentially, this flag could be passed to rsync command in order to achieve what you described. However, this approach would have the problem that symbolic links would not be copied as links further into the tree as well. They would instead be copied as the actual files the link(s) are pointing.

From the rsync manual : 

> -L, --copy-links
>   When symlinks are encountered, the item that they point to  (the
>   referent) is copied, rather than the symlink.  In older versions
>   of rsync, this option also had the side-effect  of  telling  the
>   receiving  side to follow symlinks, such as symlinks to directories.
>   In a modern rsync such as this one, you'll need to  specify  
>   --keep-dirlinks  (-K) to get this extra behavior. The only exception
>   is when sending files to an rsync that is too  old  to understand 
>   -K -- in that case, the -L option will still have the side-effect of
>   -K on that older receiving rsync.

One possibility may be to have an array for the source variable in the configuration so that multiple sources may be specified.

Another approach would be an option for specifying a directory of symbolic links as the source. Then LBackup could run a backup for each symbolic link within that source directory.

Alternative suggestions, comments or ideas are welcomed.

With the current version of LBackup, you may have separate configuration directories for each source. Depending upon your setup, another possibility may be to use the excludes file. Please see the following URL as an example for Mac OS X systems : http://www.lbackup.org/full_system_backup

Thanks.

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