performance issues and rsync --link-dest option

Dear developers,
I used backintime for a short while, I loved it's easy and effective interface but was quite disappointed with its performance when backing up a directory of many thousand of files to a network drive (either cifs or sshfs) when only a few files are modified. I.e. it takes so long to recreate the directory structure and make the hard links that even if only a few files have changed the entire process takes one hour.

I even rewrote the entire make directories and hard links entirely in python to see if it could be improved, taking care to avoid every unnecessary input/output but with little improvement (I can send yo uthe code if you wish).

On the other hand, I found out that the --link-dest=/last/backup/dir option of rsync does exactly the same job as BiT mkdir+ln+rsync but is several orders of magnitude faster. It can also work directly over ssh, removing the need of cifs or sshfs which contributes quite a bit to the performance boost. So now I don my backups by hand with rsync, which is ok, but I miss the practicity of BiT.

I don't know if you were aware of this option, I would suggest you rely directly on rsync if possible provided how smoothly it works.

bests