Cloud backup and hard links

[aix]

I'm using urbackup[1] for backing up my various computers onto my TrueNAS SCALE. This works really well.

I would like to make regular offsite backups of the urbackup store to an S3 provider.

Now, urbackup makes use of hard links for files that haven't changed between backups. Storing each hard link on S3 as a separate file would lead to astronomical storage costs.

Is there a way to do S3 backups in a way that would be compatible with hard links? With Cloud Sync or another tool.

[1] https://www.urbackup.org/

 

[winnielinnie]

Amazon S3 won't preserve hardlinks, nor am I aware of any "common" cloud-based providers that do, regardless whether or not they support rclone clients. (rclone is the client used by TrueNAS "Cloud Sync".)

 

[aix]

Thanks. To clarify, I'm not tied to rclone and would be happy to look at alternatives.

One alternative I have considered is Duplicacy. Its deduplication feature would ensure that hardlinked files are only stored once. Unfortunately, during restore hardlinks would end up as multiple identical files. This would make Duplicacy unsuitable for my use case.

If anyone has other ideas, I'd love to hear them.