Incremental Snapshot Style backups with rsync on NTFS

I've taken over development of an embedded Linux product which needs a reliable backup solution. Backups are to be performed without compression to an attached USB storage device formatted to NTFS.

The current implementation is a simple rsync --archive --verbose --delete which works, but given the --delete parameter any accidentally deleted files will also be removed from the backup which is no good.

By not using --delete on the other hand we may end up with duplicates if files get renamed.

Id like to switch this over to using hard-links to create snapshot-style backups as done by Mike Rubel, or http://webgnuru.com/linux/rsync_incremental.php, which basically comes down to:

rsync -avh --delete --link-dest=<previous-backup> <source> <backup-location>

I haven't seen any explicit mentions of file systems for this. I know that I can do this on NTFS but are there any hickups? will backups created this way be readable as expected on OSX and windows?

I haven't seen any explicit mentions of file systems for this. I know that I can do this on NTFS but are there any hickups? will backups created this way be readable as expected on OSX and windows?

While this is old, I would just like to mention one additional hickup I came across in the past years, beyond things like losing permissions. While NTFS is able to store multiple hard-links for files, their number is limited to 1023 and I had former discussions where it was reported that performance of at least older Windows/NTFS in deleting files with a lot of links was very bad. It was a discussion in a German forum about a tool called HardlinkBackup, which essentially works the same like rsync regarding hard-links. For some users it took hours to days to remove 25'000 files with 10 links from some backup history. Same people didn't report any problems with a comparable setup using some older Linux and ext* file system. I myself didn't recognize such a problem during my own tests, but things started to slow down in my tests with 50 links as well.

So while I guess things have improved a lot since Windows 7, especially because Windows relies on hard-links for updates and such itself much more these days, it might be a good idea to actually test it with some larger backup history.