A published picture is the archive's own file

Until 1.6 every picture existed twice: once in media.nosync/, and once as a copy of itself under public.nosync/. On this project's own installation that was 1.8 GB counted twice, and every import doubled again.

They are one file under two names now. Nothing about publishing changes, and neither does the archive's copy: deleting a picture from public.nosync/ -- by hand, or by the sweep, or by a deploy with --prune -- drops that name and leaves the archive's. What DOES follow the link is the mode: making the published picture readable makes the original readable too, which is the direction that was wanted, because a picture the web server cannot read was the bug this makes impossible.

It saves disk and it does not save backups. Measured against this project's own: 200 files under two names take 101 MB on the disk and 201 MB in the backup, because the backup copies file by file and stores each name in full. Back up media.nosync/ as you always did -- that is the archive's copy, and it is the one that matters.