I have a directory full of incremental backups (~20GB) which I need to copy (or move) from one partition to another. This directory contains daily snapshots which have been produced using cp -al to create symlinks to duplicate files rather than copies.
I need to copy this structure as-is, preserving the links within, but when I run a cp -r it seemed that files were being created rather than links (I'm assuming this because the copy uses more free disk space than the original after a small portion of it is copied).
How can I copy this directory to another disk, whilst preserving the link structure? And how can I know that it's copied as links? (seems hard to verify as du incldues the filesize regardless)