I'm using rsnapshot for backups. Currently that means every time an update runs (even without any data difference) I get a copy of ~100M of only the directory structure + inode list. The files are almost exclusively hardlinks.
The potential problem is that the initial copy of the backup takes ~2 minutes per each backed up destination, while the following rsync takes only seconds. Is there any way to speed it up? The current filesystem is ext4 - are there any others that would be much faster at this task?