Re: Re: pg_basebackup bug: base backup is double the size of the database - Mailing list pgsql-admin

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:02 PM, David G Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:

Craig James-2 wrote
> We've encountered a serious bug with pg_basebackup. It seems to be
> following hard links and duplicating all files in the tablespaces rather
> than preserving links.

This entire sentence doesn't make sense to me.  How does one "follow" a
hard-link?  A soft-link yes but a hard-link is an alias to actual data.  I'm
not sure directory hard-linking is even allowed or used so following in that
sense don't compute...

See the man page for rsync, the -H option, which explains it better:

       -H, --hard-links

              This  tells  rsync to look for hard-linked files in the transfer

              and link together the corresponding files on the receiving side.

              Without  this  option,  hard-linked  files  in  the transfer are

              treated as though they were separate files.