As an example of the way hardlinking saves filespace, I have run side-by-side the two commands: du -sh and du -shl on my /usr/backup/* du -sh shows disk-usage in "human readable" form, and only the total. du -shl does the same, but counts each hardlinked file for as many times as it appears. 3.4M /usr/backup/dark 3.4M /usr/backup/dark 68K /usr/backup/dark.1 | 3.4M /usr/backup/dark.1 24K /usr/backup/dark.2 | 3.4M /usr/backup/dark.2 110M /usr/backup/distilled 110M /usr/backup/distilled 764K /usr/backup/distilled.1 | 107M /usr/backup/distilled.1 352K /usr/backup/distilled.2 | 107M /usr/backup/distilled.2 126M /usr/backup/eliza 126M /usr/backup/eliza 3.2G /usr/backup/emiline 3.2G /usr/backup/emiline 147M /usr/backup/emiline.1 | 3.2G /usr/backup/emiline.1 147M /usr/backup/emiline.2 | 3.2G /usr/backup/emiline.2 21G /usr/backup/falkor 21G /usr/backup/falkor 192G /usr/backup/oxide 192G /usr/backup/oxide 4.0M /usr/backup/oxide.1 | 192G /usr/backup/oxide.1 2.1G /usr/backup/oxide.2 | 194G /usr/backup/oxide.2 4.2M /usr/backup/pocketpal 4.2M /usr/backup/pocketpal 304M /usr/backup/slut 304M /usr/backup/slut 2.6M /usr/backup/slut.1 | 305M /usr/backup/slut.1 2.7M /usr/backup/slut.2 | 306M /usr/backup/slut.2 22G /usr/backup/snow 22G /usr/backup/snow 5.7M /usr/backup/snow.1 | 22G /usr/backup/snow.1 11M /usr/backup/snow.2 | 22G /usr/backup/snow.2 17M /usr/backup/snow.3 | 22G /usr/backup/snow.3 31M /usr/backup/snow.4 | 22G /usr/backup/snow.4 0 /usr/backup/snow.5 0 /usr/backup/snow.5 365M /usr/backup/sofea 365M /usr/backup/sofea 359M /usr/backup/sofea.1 | 724M /usr/backup/sofea.1 104K /usr/backup/sofea.2 | 12M /usr/backup/sofea.2 35G /usr/backup/torrents 35G /usr/backup/torrents 6.0M /usr/backup/tripwire 6.0M /usr/backup/tripwire 30G /usr/backup/wetfloor 30G /usr/backup/wetfloor 82M /usr/backup/wetfloor.1 | 27G /usr/backup/wetfloor.1 2.1G /usr/backup/wetfloor.2 | 25G /usr/backup/wetfloor.2 7.9M /usr/backup/wetfloor.3 | 22G /usr/backup/wetfloor.3 7.9M /usr/backup/wetfloor.4 | 22G /usr/backup/wetfloor.4 The column on the left shows the "true" amount of space each backup is taking on the disk. The column on the right shows how much space would be used for each folder if I were not using hardlinks. You can see here that I am using 305.73GB of diskspace. You can see on the right column that without hardlinks, storing this amount of backups would take 874.48GB. While this is not as effective as true data deduplication, maintaing the same exact backups in nearly 1/3rd the space, anyone can appreciate. Perhaps even more important than saving the diskspace, is that I am only transferring the amount of data that has changed over the network daily. If I change 1 text file in a dir of 100GB, only that 1 file is transferred over the network again. The rest is just hardlinked from the copy already on the backup machine.