Hi StephenB

You're right... nothing for regular Backup or rSync to tell them not to follow symlinks, but I understand rsync and regular Backup never follows symlinks anyhow, since the direct inode entry for symlinks marks the file/directory inode as 'simulated'

Plus, I mistakenly said in my earlier post I used rdfind to create symlinks, I didn't I used it to create hardlinks. Which I think is lucky, because I would guess, not tested, if I use rdfind to create symlinks "Sync with Google Drive" would 'notice' the file had been changed and then either copy it back to GoogleDrive if two way sync is on (eek!) or redownload all the duplicated files, if one way sync is on (which is my scenario - I am making a backup of my gDrive). As I've just learned, hard links are actually pointers to the original file's inode, i.e. other than consulting the inode using "stat -c %h -c %A <File>" you can't tell a hardlink from the original file

However, the advanced rSync option does include "Preserve Hard Links" which is *exactly* what I need. So since I created hardlinks with rdfind, moving to rSync to backup locally, using as StephenB said here, localhost 127.0.0.1 and then telling rSync to Preserve Hard Links is a good work around. Preserve Hard Links in rSync

I have updated the idea for Sync with Google Drive to create links not make multiple copies, i.e. preserve hardlinks from GoogleDrive when it syncs to ReadyNAS to include this as a second part of the workaround (part 1: use rdfind to make the hardlinks after the Google Sync is complete.

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