Backup to External Drive while Preserving Hardlinks

[The_Ianator]

I want to backup my FreeNAS to an external drive. The freenas currently is using 12TB of space, but with heavy use of hardlinks, without hardlinks it would be over 20TBs in size. I have a 16TB JBOD volume I would like to back up to. I have tried using the tool "HardlinkBackup" and tried using rsync through cygwin (using -H), testing two folders holding the same hardlinked media file. Both just copied the file twice taking up too much space.

Does anyone have a method to backup that would handle hardlinks correctly?

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to find a solution?