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"--link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged"

Hence if you rsync over to your backup drive, you can get rsync to
hard link against a previous backup version on that same (backup
drive) partition so that rsync then only copies new/changed files.

If you're trying to create a 'backup' on the *same* partition as your
live data, then that's not a good idea in the first place. That's
dangerous even for giving a sense of false security...

Also note that rsync uses the mtime and permissions to decide whether
a file has changed. Some nasty programs in the Windows world (and
elsewhere?) will modify a file in-place or otherwise without changing
the mtime! rsync can do an md5sum check on everything but that is
rather slow.


Aside: Do not use the --delete option in rsync! Very dangerous if you
ever get the destination wrong... If it defaults to root or to the
current working directory, you'll get everything deleted...

Cheers,
Martin