How do I back up folders containing symbolic links?

martinlest · 03 Mar 2018

A symbolic link can be backed up as path information to a target directory, or it can be backed up as a directory.

Apparently...

I want to back up a (parent) folder & sub-folders which all contain symbolic links. I don't want to back up the target folders to which the links point (several TBs of data!), I want to back up the path information. There are some two thousand symbolic links in all, which I had to create individually (several hours of work!), so I am keen to have a copy of the parent folder (which contains many sub-folders and other files, apart from the links) in case of disaster.

When I try to back up (I tend to use XXCopy or Robocopy), I either get an error for the symlinks (MKDIR failed) - the rest of the info backs up OK - or the programme starts to back up the target folders.

I've been Googling this for ages now with no luck so far, so I hope someone here will be able to step in!

Thanks.

martinlest · 03 Mar 2018

OK, odd thing. This is my basic XXCopy script:

XXCOPY "D:\Ortho4XP\Tiles" "N:\D-Ortho4XP Backup\Tiles"

When I run it once I get MKDIR failed for every folder. But if I run the same script again, once the first has finished, it then goes on to back up all the symlinks (the path data as I needed, not the target). Well, I can just run the script twice, but I wonder why it always fails on the first try?