Firstly, my apology for seeming to have ignored your helpful reply to my original post. This was not intentional: I had no idea that there had been any responses to any of my post to the mailing list, until earlier this morning,, because I can see no indication that replies have been made. Indeed I will say that I find this mailing list implementation to be difficult to use: even now the only way I can find the list of threads, and potential responses, is via the 'posting activity' of my account profile. There should be a simpler way. In the interim between your reply and this acknowledgement, I have concluded that the situation I reported has one explanation: operator ineptitude. Having deleted that profile and its associated snap shots, BIT is now delivering the results I expected. To answer your questions: 1. File system type: Ext4 on both host and backup medium, under Linux Mint 21.2 2. output of 'df -T' command: Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on tmpfs tmpfs 3266288 2068 3264220 1% /run /dev/nvme0n1p2 ext4 155572568 17273612 130323484 12% / tmpfs tmpfs 16331428 8 16331420 1% /dev/shm tmpfs tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock /dev/nvme0n1p3 ext4 322826564 158398048 147956760 52% /media/tony/7D-xtra /dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat 94759 6186 88574 7% /boot/efi /dev/nvme1n1p2 ext4 921853660 284315764 590636548 33% /home /dev/sda1 ext4 960302096 371353232 540094440 41% /media/tony/7D-Backup tmpfs tmpfs 3266284 1708 3264576 1% /run/user/1000 3. Backup medium (HDD) is directly connected to my system (and is manually replicated, for resiliency, using FreeFileSync, to multiple USB connected HDDs) 4. I believe my system, as far as BIT use is concerned, supports hardlinks throughout.