Hi.

First - let me describe how my backup routine is put together:

• On a usb stick, there is one folder that only contains symlinks. That is links that points to folders and files that I intended to backup as a daily routine.
• This setup works perfectly as backup with versioning. There are no issue that need to be fixed.
• The full backup command goes: rsync -bmrtv -L --delete-after --backup-dir='/usbstick/versioning/'$(date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M") --log-file='/usbstick/versioning/rsync-log.log' '/usbstick/collection-of-symlinks/' '/usbstick/backup/'

As it is today, that works nice, but in the future I don't want a symlink happens to be created somewhere inside the directories that the symlinks poining to (because it may fill up the usb stick).

And there is the problem. If i remove the -L parameter of rsynk, that will also make rsynk not taking backup of anything.

I know very well I can make a script parsing each symlink and then just remove the -L parameter, but is there another way to achieve this still just running one command ?

I'm not quite clear on what your goal is, perhaps you could expand a little on what you are trying to do.

If you want the file copied instead of the symlink, then try the --copy-links option. But if you want to skip over directories which happen to be symlinks then maybe the --safe-links might work. That tells rsync not to copy stuff outside the directory hierarchy.