[sf-lug] question about cp -al

[Alex Kleider]

On 2016-09-19 11:43, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Alex Kleider (akleider at sonic.net):
> 
>> This never occurred to me- it wasn't mentioned by
>> W. Curtis Preston: Backup & Recovery - O'Reilly
>> but your suggestion got me studying man rsync and I think:
>>             --link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when
>> unchanged
>> is the option I want.
>> Thanks for the idea!
> 
> Yr. welcome!  rsync is generally awesome for many copy operations,
> especially those that update an existing copy, of course.

Googling "rsync --link-dest option explanation"
I stumbled upon the following:
https://jimmyg.org/blog/2007/incremental-backups-using-rsync.html
and found it helpful.
There's a tricky part in that if a relative path is specified, it must 
be relative to the destination, not to the current working directory.