Hard-links used for image-mode don't really fit Time Machine

[spiralyoda-macports@…]

When doing a full restauration with leopard's time machine, I noticed a little downside with macports, because by default macports uses hardlinks for the files it installs, hardlink of /opt/local/var/software/* in /opt/local/*. As Time Machine already uses an external disk, and also uses hard links for its own internal "cooking", macports' hardlinks aren't kept as is, & when restauring we get 2 different files, though using more space in /opt/local & maybe would this also cause some problems if upgrading some ports, I don't know for sure.

Possible clues: using symlinks, disabling image mode, "deactivating and reactivating everything would recreate the hardlinks too I think", thanks to afb for the suggestion.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

This is rather a issue of Time Machine if it cannot backup hard links correctly.

[spiralyoda-macports@…]

Well, of course it's an issue of Time Machine, but :

a) I don't think we have enought weight to make sure apple solves it so we'd better find a workaround in macports. b) The way hard-links work make it really difficult to store them on a different hard-drive (reference number for a file on a volume...) c) Time machine internally uses hard-links for incremental backups d) I don't think what is done with hard-links in macports couldn't be done as well with symlinks, and symlinks would perfectly fit with Time Machine.

[kballard (Lily Ballard)]

Symlinks would probably break a lot of stuff.

[danielluke (Daniel J. Luke)]

The initial implementation used symlinks (which mostly works but does break some things). In fact, the current implementation falls back to symlinks if hard links don't work.

An existing workaround is to just run in 'direct' mode (perhaps with 'archivemode' as well).

[tobypeterson]

Milestone MacPorts base bugs deleted

[nerdling (Jeremy Lavergne)]

Cc Me!

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

No longer using hardlinks as of r77511.