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Currently use this utility for performing large backups on Windows NTFS. The backups are perfect mirrors of the primary. It also preserves hardlinks, which can be used to save a lot of disk space:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/ln/ln.html

It does the job. However, it takes hours to complete. I realized if I used a version control system to perform backups instead (I think the term might be incremental backups?), the backup would only act on files that were added, removed, or changed rather than backing up 99% the same files as the previous backup and would only take a fraction of the time to complete.

However, I heard that git does not properly support hardlinks? Is there a utility out there that does some incremental backup (e.g. version control) or whatever that perfectly preserves the hardlinks and creates a perfect mirror of the primary on Windows?

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  • Take look into Restic it is a well designed open source backup tool that supports file deduplication and incremental backups.
    – Robert
    Apr 16, 2022 at 20:11
  • I use backintime (free-opensource) on linux. Available in most distro package managers, I believe. It does incremental and full backups. It runs at set times and will retain the backups on any schedule pattern you wish. You set symlink options as to only copy the link file or all the files connected to the link. See if this works for you.
    – tckosvic
    Apr 17, 2022 at 0:46

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I found out that http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/ln/ln.html actually supports incremental backups in the form of delorean copies. I think this might actually do what I need after looking into it deeply.

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