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Robocopy Backup on Vista

Posted by stephen on March 26th 2007 to General

I run a nightly backup here using Robocopy.  It worked great on XP.  Since I switched to Vista, it hasn’t been working, and I finally was able to take a look at it today.

The Robocopy log file was showing that it was trying to copy files into C:\Users\All Users\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\… and so on …

As of Vista (well, NTFS 3.0), you can make Junction Points, which are essentially the same thing as symlinks in Unix.  And apparently C:\Users\All Users\Application Data\Application Data is a symlink to…it’s parent.  Good job!

The fix for my Robocopy backup was to add the /XJ flag.  That tells Robocopy it to skip Junction Points.  It means that a restore from that backup will be missing those links, but that’s better than not getting a backup at all.

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