On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 01:30:22PM -0500, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
> There was a thread a little while back warning about junction point
> and Windows Vista/7. Also, the Wikki
> (http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/backuppc/index.php?title=Common_backup_excludes)
> talks about the need to exclude Junction points to avoid duplicate
> backup trees.
> 
> But it seems to me that at least when using cygwin rsync, that
> junction points are treated as symlinks so that there doesn't appear
> to be any duplication in backups.
> 
> The only issue may be in restoring in that cygwin rsync won't
> distinguish between true symlinks and junction points which are
> different animals in the Windows world.
> 
> Am I missing something?

I think so. The junction point isn't really treated as a symbolic
link. Rsync will back up a symbolic link as a link, it won't
dereference it (unless you ask it to). However a junction point grafts
the target location into the tree at that point and rsync merrily
continues to walk down and back up the grafted part of the tree. So
you have two copies of the files:

  1 the original location the junction point is pointing to
  2 the same files located under the junction point

Also your backups don't have a record of the junction point that rsync
traversed. When you restore the files you get two copies of the
grafted tree. One at each location.

-- 
                                -- rouilj

John Rouillard       System Administrator
Renesys Corporation  603-244-9084 (cell)  603-643-9300 x 111

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