Some strange things I notice: your includes and excludes are a bit weird like: --exclude="/home/peter/BiTtest" --include="/home/peter/BiTtest/subfolder/**" Should not mention the exclude... oh wait it should mention it if the folder that should only be backupped once every year or something is a subfolder of a folder that should be backupped every 10 minutes, it should exclude it. And apparently it does not overwrite the includes -> it produces the snapshot with the files anyway So that makes sense What does not on the other hand is the cp -alb function for a folder it already copied, anyway, actually what is the whole reason for this command, ignored folders are copied anyway during the hardlinking? At the moment I am checking a quite difficult backup scheme to see if this behaviour is reproducable here. Probably some commands for the schedule per folder backup do the wrong thing. Ok, it is now making a snapshot and calls indeed the cp -alb command, it consumes loads of time. It even comes over the 10 minutes (the rsync took not more than 2 minutes) so it delays my next (hourly) backup. However it does do the right thing if the directories are disjoint. I will try to make an exclude that is joint... The backup dir has grown incredibly in size, however I do not see the ~ behaviour yet. What I do see is time consumption, and size consumption. The hardlinking definitely fails when it does the small job (I have two schedules: 1 every 10 minutes, 1 every hour). The every hour job goes perfectly fine and as normal, but the 10 minutes job is behaving not as it should (actually right at this point it consumed all the space there was, filling up my logs with warnings, while there used to be plenty of space two hours ago when I started this test, it also did not rename or remove the new-snapshot folder any longer, -> another bug...) So far my main conclusion is that you should not use the schedule per included folder option as it is still buggy! Cheers, Bart 2009/8/31 Borph