TL;DR No archive format like tar, zip, ... but how would you theoretically represent a symlink in a manner that can be stored on the cloud and retrieved back to the system as a symlink?
Backstory
I heavily use symlinks to organise my media and even wrote an application that helps me do so (it's in Python and being rewritten in Rust). But I also use stuff like home-manager and nix which makes heavy use of symlinks.
My goal is to back up my media and /home to the cloud at regular intervals. There are services that cost just about 60-100€ yearly for limitless storage in the cloud. So having part of my library purely in the cloud and using terrabytes of space would cost less than a single 15TB HDD (500+€). To have a local backup, I'd even need a least a second one, which would put me at >1000€ - the equivalent of at least 10 years of cloud storage.
Options explored
It is pretty sweet as it supports mounting a cloud drive as a folder and has transparent encryption! However there are multiple open issues on uploading symlinks and I don't know Go. I wouldn't mind trying to learn it if I had an idea how to upload a symlink without following it (following symlinks breaks them).
git-annex etc.
git-annex and using a bare git repo with a remote worktree is great, but I don't need to make diffs of stuff and follow how things moved around, etc. I just need to replace backups with a view of what's there. Plus, storing all that history will probably take enormous amounts of space which is wasteful.
Ideas
store a blob of stat() call for every file
I'm not sure about this. The stat struct does contain information about the filetype (directory, hard link, symlink, ...), but my knowledge of linux internals is limited and maybe that's too complicated for this usecase.
a db of links
Instead of storing the links themselves, I store a DB (sqlite? CSV?) of links, upload that DB and use the DB to restore links after pull it back down. 🤔 Actually this might be the simplest thing to do, but maybe y'all have better ideas.
I have no comment on the syncing problem, but could you lmk what the cheap cloud services are? I'm reaching the end of my rope with Google Workspace drive no longer being unlimited and Dropbox ended their "as much as you need" policy
Nextcloud. It's open source, you can go with one of their providers or host it yourself I'd you don't mind playing with config.
Jottacloud is what I want to use. Unlimited storage for ~100€/month
Close behind is 1fichier for 2€/TB/month or 12€/TB/year, but they are in France and "uptobox" (a similar provider) was shutdown by the US on French soil because they allowed providing links to the files.
You can probably find others in the list of storage systems supported by rclone
Oh. Yea I've been in the Google Workspace Unlimited alternative thread on the rclone forums, apparently jotta will eventually hit a point on its "gradual slowdown" that it's practically worthless (Iirc it was around 10TB, so for jotta "unlimited" is functionally 10TB)
1ficihier was also talked about, but ig you have to reupload any given file every 30 days or it will expire