awareness of symbolic links or junction points
Hi!
I like to use symbolic links as known in Unix file systems - also in Windows.
In Win XP there are so called junction points by which I link directories.
NTFS coming with Vista/Windows 7 supports real symbolic links.
I want to know if Acronis backup software supports sym links.
Most Windows programs are not aware of this and see the link targets as different files.
Especially I want to be sure that the files under sym linked directories are not backuped twice. There should only be backuped one symlink file.
Sure restore should work this way as well.
Thanks!
Best regards
Robert
While you're waiting for an answer from Acronis, you might want to read this old thread from the archived forum: Handling of NTFS Junction Points by "partition image" backup
Is this in regards to a specific version of Acronis software (B&R 10, TI 2010, etc.)?
Something has changed from the time the topic MudCrab has mentioned.
I'm using a cross partition junction points on my server and it seems to work (with B&R 10) - partition linked to a NTFS folder located on a second disk, and don't having own letters. BUT it works but it is not perfect (but it is probably related to a specific storage controller I'm using).
When creating a disk backup then I see all volumes. When I backup a volume that contains a link to another volume then only the linking folder is being backed up. The linked volume has to be backed up separately.
As for cross file, cross folder links - only the link is being backed up (all vista like linked folders) - no double copy.
I think this works because disk copy is a sector-by-sector copy. And for that symlinks and junctions are not important.
Things get a little complicated when doing a file backup. Now I don't see the linked volumes (course the don't have letters assigned) but would like to backup data on linked folder. It works but B&R has some problem locking the target volume (but it's aware of that and tries to do that). But this is related to adaptec raid controllers that I have, and works better or worse from B&R version (10278 was perfect, 11105 works really slow (~20KB/s) on linked volume).
I've created a file archive on doc and settings and users folders and sadly i have found out that the data is seen twice in the archive (both in users and doc and settings) but data is copied once. B&R shows doc&settings as an ntfs junction and does not count the data to be copied on when data is on the same volume.