We need to backup a filesystem with lots of hardlinks. Since there are several hardlinks for each "true" file, we would like to skip all the hardlinks when backing up the filesystem to avoid n exact copies of each file.

The backup is done using Tivoli Storage Manager Backup, and we've been unable to get it to treat hardlinks as anything other than separate files to be backed up alongside each other.

In case it's relevant for possible solutions, I'd like to note that it's possible to tell a hardlink from a proper file by the filename:

 foobarbaz-123.ext    # file
 foobarbaz-123-1.ext  # hardlink
 foobarbaz-123-2.ext  # hardlink
 barbazfoo-456.ext    # file
 barbazfoo-456-1.ext  # hardlink
 barbazfoo-456-2.ext  # hardlink
 barbazfoo-456-3.ext  # hardlink

That is, all hardlinks have two hyphens in the filename, where as proper files have just the one.

The server is running Ubuntu Linux, and the files are situated on a gfs volume on our SAN.