> 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 don't *think* you are -- junction points have been around since Windows 2000 or so, and are best described as a kind of limited symbolic link -- to be confusingly replaced in Vista with NTFS symbolic links (symlinks) which are still called "junction points" for historical reasons. These are not to be confused with "directory junctions," which was kind of the missing piece of a symbolic link -- and NTFS *does* also do hard links. On the plus side, in more recent versions of NTFS, although the implementation ultimately is reparse point weirdness, behaves pretty much like POSIX symbolic and hard links. I'll whang together a chart: POSIX | Windows 7 | Older Windows ----------------------------------------------------- symbolic link | soft link or symlink | junction point/directory junction hard link | hard link | hard link Last I checked, cygwin/rsync/tar treated modern Windows symbolic links sanely, and treated hard links like unrelated copies of the same file. I'm not sure if this is still the case or what the ramifications are for recovery. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The modern datacenter depends on network connectivity to access resources and provide services. The best practices for maximizing a physical server's connectivity to a physical network are well understood - see how these rules translate into the virtual world? http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnlfb _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/