So I have been searching for this up and down, but must be doing something fundamentally wrong. What I want to do:
I have configured my NAS to make snapshots of my home folder, file system is btrfs. That works as it should and is utilizing hard links.
I want to copy off the whole snapshots directory for backup on an ext4 usb disk, using rsync -aH to preserve the hard links. But hard links are not preserved after rsync completes - I am down to a minimum example where I rsync a file of 2 different snapshots (verified to have identical Inodes) on the btrfs volume - just to another directory - which also creates 2 distinct files. Am I missing an rsync option here to make this work? Or is rsync simply incapable to do this? Wrong tool for the job?