> 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:

This has NOT been my experience on Windows 7.  I simply get symlinks,
which is what I expect.

The difference may be explained by versions of cygwin/rsync; I do recall
older versions following symlinks as you describe, but that is NOT what I
see.  I don't have any Vista systems, so I can't speak to how those
behave, but realistically, it should be a matter of how rsync sees NTFS,
which is semantically identical to a *nix symbolic link.

>   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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