Hi,
I use rsync to make an offsite backup of the whole urbackup server dir. It turns out, that after a fresh rsync, the offsite backup is much larger than the urbackup source size:
105G BackupsV2/
The target, after rsyncing with rsync -a --delete source target:
581G BackupsV2/
Is there any magic, I should tell rsync? symlinks should be copied as is with -a?
Maybe urBackup could do a offsite backup itself (with compression)?
This sounds to me like something going on with symlinks being followed and their root file being copied to your offsite backup every time the symlink appears. You could try the -l or -a flags to tell it to copy symlinks as symlinks and see if that works.
If your offsite volume is cloud storage that doesn’t support symlinks, you might have to use something like rclone with the --links flag, which converts a symlink into a custom file format that can exist on the cloud volume but be converted back to a symlink correctly when restoring.
This is already the case. And rsync does copy only the links, thats what I dont understand.
Interestingly, there are non-symlinked files (untouched files between backups) on both sides, urbackup and offsite backup. I thought every untouched file would be symlinked somehow.
On the other hand, I have symlinks on both side for several folders, maybe thats another question.
(Example: IMG_20210917_0001.pdf exists on UrBackup side in /mnt/user/BackupsV2/Robins-Blade/220810-0221/Users/Robin/Documents as well as in /mnt/user/BackupsV2/Robins-Blade/220810-0623/Users/Robin/Documents as full file but was not touched in any way between the dates.)
Both file systems are xfs. UrBackup is up as docker container.
I dont know what to test further now.
Any further thoughts? Issue still existing 
Got it. I did not know, that rsync needs to use -H to do hard links. Now its working.