how to backup remote location containing hard links, without rsync

I want to backup backintime-data from an internet-facing, remote machine running debian 11 (src). That is the hardlinks-part from the title. I want to back it up to a (very dumb) NAS (dest) in the internal network. Connecting to both via ssh-keys and running the backup is a third machine running debian 10. I'd like to use borgbackup - to stay with one solution for the all the machines (also: compression, encryption), but I'm open for other ideas. For accessing remote data in borgbackup, use of sshfs is suggested in their docs . But sshfs can't handle hardlinks on the reading side. Rsync should be/is able to handle hardlinks but can only handle one remote connection. Using sshfs on the dest-part of rsync throws errors ( rsync: chown "dest/filename" failed: No such file or directory (2) and rsync: mknod "dest/filename" failed: Operation not permitted (1)). The sshfs-option -o sshfs_sync is used. So I thought piping rsync into borgbackup via the stdin option, but -again according to borgbackup docs - this omits metadata (seemingly even group-/ownership) from the file. I still have to play with this answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/183516/134408 So, what could I do? What are my other options?