Preserve Windows Symlinks

Kevin Korb kmk at sanitarium.net
Tue Dec 29 13:52:33 UTC 2020


If you delete the link then restore it does it start working again when
in the correct place?

Also, don't use --checksum unless you are really certain you understand
how terribly slow it is and how it doesn't actually accomplish much of
anything (certainly not any kind of data verification).

On 12/29/20 7:29 AM, Edwin Bradford via rsync wrote:
> Is it possible to preserve Windows symlinks when backing up from NTFS to
> NTFS volumes or any other for that matter?
> 
> I am running rsync in Ubuntu in Windows Subsytem for Linux on Windows 10
> backing up a local NTFS volume to an external NTFS volume (and also to a
> remote Unix server).
> 
> The source NTFS volume has symlinks created in Windows using:
> 
>     mklink the\link the\file
>     mklink /d the\link the\directory
> 
> I am running rsync within a long shell script with the command:
> 
>     rsync
>     --verbose --archive --checksum --itemize-changes --human-readable
>     --delete --delete-excluded --partial --progress --stats
>     --exclude-from='ignore.txt'
>     source/ destination
> 
> The symlinks are copied to the external NTFS partition and have the same
> name but no functionality. Windows doesn't recognise them as symlinks,
> doesn't know what to do with them and there is no apparent difference
> between symlinked directories and files.
> 
> I tried creating the symlinks with relative paths on the source volume
> but rsync generated an error and refused to complete. Using --copy-links
> instead of --links (implicit in --archive) gives the expected behaviour
> but I would prefer to preserve symlinks rather than replace them with
> their linked contents.
> 
> At this point I'm not sure if it's a limitation of rsync and NTFS
> compatibility or whether I'm missing something.
> 
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> 
> Email: edwinbradford at gmail.com <mailto:edwinbradford at gmail.com>
> 
> Tel.: +44 (0)7981 873 771
> 
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> 

-- 
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	Kevin Korb			Phone:    (407) 252-6853
	Systems Administrator		Internet:
	FutureQuest, Inc.		Kevin at FutureQuest.net  (work)
	Orlando, Florida		kmk at sanitarium.net (personal)
	Web page:			https://sanitarium.net/
	PGP public key available on web site.
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