Hi, I'm not sure if it's rsync or Cygwin problem, but most probably both.. Here is a short description: I run rsync daemon on Windows machine (either latest cwRsync or Cygwin versions) and synchronize a Windows directory to Linux server as root: linux# rsync -avH --numeric-ids 10.0.0.1::test /export/test1/ receiving file list ... done created directory /export/test1 ./ 43524353.upd 43534354.upd <snip> Directory is synced properly, but when I try to sync it again (nothing has changed on Windows machine since previous sync) using --link-dest to create 'hard-linked snapshot' directory is copied again (should be hard-linked) instead: linux# rsync -avH --numeric-ids --link-dest=/export/test1/ 10.0.0.1::test /export/test2/ receiving file list ... done created directory /export/test2 ./ 43524353.upd 43534354.upd <snip> Looking closer I found out that because of UID change files are not hard-linked: linux# rsync -avvvH --numeric-ids --link-dest=/export/test1/ 193.0.2.129::test /export/test2/|grep uid set uid of . from 0 to -1 set uid of 43524353.upd from 0 to -1 set uid of 43534354.upd from 0 to -1 <snip> It looks like when rsync synchronised files for the first time (to /export/test1 directory) it created them with UID=0 (because rsync was ran as root) and then it tried to change UID to -1 (which means 'do not change it'). When it tried to synchronise it for the 2nd time (to /export./test2 directory with --link-dest option enabled) it compared existing UID (0) with received one (-1) and they did not match, so file was copied instead of hard-linked to the previous version. Cheers, Marcin