How to ignore symlinks (cant restore backup)

Support
#1

Helllo, I have two questions:
1.) How do I restore without creating symlinks (ignore them?)
2.) If that’s not possible, how to set symlinks not to be saved during backup?

My user case:
I use Duplicacy for fast frequent backup of C:\users folder on Windows, specifically appdata folders with -vss

What I’m trying to do:
I would like to restore the entire c:\users backup to another disk, so I can explore what’s big in the backup, etc. I want to restore only data without symlinks, so that the real size of the data in the backup can be reliably calculated and there is no risk of affecting the host system and data

My approach and problem:

  1. I created new exFAT partition for restore - because exFAT don’t support symlinks

  2. IN GUI I started restore to exFAT partition

  3. I get error and nothing is restored (only empty root folders)

The restore command encountered an error:
Can't create symlink All Users/Application Data: symlink C:\ProgramData \\?\W:\appdata_26.11-8110-restore-exfat\All Users\Application Data: Incorrect function.

Exit code: 100

and this error in log:

ERROR RESTORE_SYMLINK Can't create symlink All Users/Application Data: symlink C:\ProgramData \\?\W:\appdata_26.11-8110-restore-exfat\All Users\Application Data: Incorrect function.

I tried some parameters - same problem

-persist
or
-ignore-owner

If I try run Duplicacy without elevation, I get:

2022-11-26 12:12:29.308 ERROR RESTORE_SYMLINK Can't create symlink All Users/Application Data: symlink C:\ProgramData \\?\W:\appdata_26.11-8110-restore-exfat-user\All Users\Application Data: A required privilege is not held by the client.

Any idea how to ignore symlinks during backup or restore?
Is there an equivalent to the Duplicati setting symlink-policy ?

Thanks

#2

Sorry there isn’t an option to skip symlinks. You’ll have to exclude those symlinks (I guess there aren’t too many?).

#3

Inside every user folder is aprox 10 symlinks (appdata,documents etc)

But, if I need to restore content of C:\Users\user\AppData\Local folder, I cant restore that folder in Duplicacy because:

  • Duplicati will restore full path, so I cant exclude symlinks. If I want restore folder C:\Users\user\AppData\Local then I get error because parent folder is symlink
Can't create symlink user/AppData/Local/Application Data: symlink C:\Users\user\AppData\Local \\?\W:\appdata_29.11-8110-restore-exfat_local\user\AppData\Local\Application Data: Incorrect function.
  • And I cant restore all subfolders without root folder …I can restore “Local” folder subfolders, but I would have to repeat the restore 60 times for each subfolder to complete the restore… (because web gui don’t support selecting multiple folders)

I’ve found a lot of mentions on the forum about symlinks and problems with recovery because the “ignore errors” parameter is missing, but I wouldn’t have thought the situation was that bad. Personally, I will reconsider using Duplicacy in the future because one thing is super backup and the other is recovery options.

This symlink problem could also be seen as a security flaw. Even non-admin users can create symlinks in Windows, even to external drives. And if symlinks can’t be batch ignored during Duplicacy restore, I imagine it will be possible to block Duplicacy restore using symlinks to non-existent locations…

#4

Is this specifically a Windows problem? I am able to successfully restore a directory tree containing a broken symlink, with the backup and restore operations happening on different Linux machines. The symlink is restored and still points to the correct nonexistent location, which is how I would expect/want it to behave.