TL;DR No archive format like tar, zip, … but how would you theoretically represent a symlink in a manner that can be stored on the cloud and retrieved back to the system as a symlink?

Backstory

I heavily use symlinks to organise my media and even wrote an application that helps me do so (it’s in Python and being rewritten in Rust). But I also use stuff like home-manager and nix which makes heavy use of symlinks.

My goal is to back up my media and /home to the cloud at regular intervals. There are services that cost just about 60-100€ yearly for limitless storage in the cloud. So having part of my library purely in the cloud and using terrabytes of space would cost less than a single 15TB HDD (500+€). To have a local backup, I’d even need a least a second one, which would put me at >1000€ - the equivalent of at least 10 years of cloud storage.

Options explored

rclone

It is pretty sweet as it supports mounting a cloud drive as a folder and has transparent encryption! However there are multiple open issues on uploading symlinks and I don’t know Go. I wouldn’t mind trying to learn it if I had an idea how to upload a symlink without following it (following symlinks breaks them).

git-annex etc.

git-annex and using a bare git repo with a remote worktree is great, but I don’t need to make diffs of stuff and follow how things moved around, etc. I just need to replace backups with a view of what’s there. Plus, storing all that history will probably take enormous amounts of space which is wasteful.

Ideas

store a blob of stat() call for every file

I’m not sure about this. The stat struct does contain information about the filetype (directory, hard link, symlink, …), but my knowledge of linux internals is limited and maybe that’s too complicated for this usecase.

a db of links

Instead of storing the links themselves, I store a DB (sqlite? CSV?) of links, upload that DB and use the DB to restore links after pull it back down. 🤔 Actually this might be the simplest thing to do, but maybe y’all have better ideas.