I run a shared server for a group of friends and we finally all have stable income in order to do offsite backups. I looked into it and I believe backblaze to be my best option(looked into rclone for running the backups but I’m open to suggestions).
The thing is I’ve got a folder from a user who just dumped everything from all his drives with the intent of organizing it on the server. I deduplicated that data with hardlinks(files with same name, size and hash to ensure no false positives) in the name of saving space but my question now is: would I be able to preserve those hardlinks in any way or would syncing that data to backblaze duplicate it again?
It depends which program you’re using, for example even tar will preserve hard links. Or on the other side something like duplicacy will just deduplicate everything that has the same content.
deduplicating is fine, the question is what it will do on a restore.
As far as I can tell from searching the web, duplicacy will restore two (or more) hard linked files as separate files. (Apart from the obvious one of losing the connection, your restore directory takes more space than the original).
Restic (again searching, but this I can probably test since I use restic) will restore them properly – i.e., preserving the hard link