Windows – Copy symbolic links with relative path – Windows 10, NTFS, Robocopy

ntfssymbolic-linkwindows 10

I am using external hard drive to store all my data that have a lots of symbolic links. The file system is NTFS.

Now I would like to copy some (or all) of the information to other drive keeping the all file structure together with symbolic links so that they point to their new location on the new drive.

I have tried to use Robocopy for that but the copied symbolic links are still pointing to the older drive. I think that maybe I am missing something with the relative/absolute paths of the files but unfortunately couldn't find any parameter for that in Robocopy.

How can I achieve this?

Please note that this is 1TB HDD and it takes long time to copy and it is not an option to make an intermediate copy or tar archive.

Best Answer

I had a case like that, it was a cocktail of some issues related to copying symbolic links, share permissions, and long filename, I tried Robocopy, troubleshooting, and some tools, all was crapy in this situation. I saw a helpful thread in this site asking about a solution for long path names, and a user recommended software called Gs Richcopy 360, now 6 months using this SW, and I can copy symbolic links (many choices), no long path name problems appear and NTFS / share permissions copied successfully. take a look at the software and its capabilities

Related Solutions

Linux – Batch Update Symbolic Links Recursively

This bash command should do it for you:

find /home/user/public_html/qa/ -type l -lname '/home/user/public_html/dev/*' -printf 'ln -nsf "$(readlink "%p" | sed s/dev/qa/)" "$(echo "%p" | sed s/dev/qa/)"\n' > script.sh

It uses find to identify all files in the qa directory that are symbolic links with a target that's in the dev directory, and for each one, it prints out a bash command that will replace the link with a link to the equivalent path in qa/. After you run this, just execute the generated script with

bash script.sh

You might want to examine it manually first to make sure it worked.

Here's a more verbose version of the above find command for easier reading (though I wouldn't necessarily write it this way in practice):

SRC_DIR="/home/user/public_html/qa"
OLD_TARGET="/home/user/public_html/dev"
SUB="s/dev/qa/"

find $SRC_DIR -type l \
  -lname "$OLD_TARGET/*" -printf \
  'ln -nsf "$(readlink "%p"|sed $SUB)" "$(echo "%p"|sed $SUB)"\n'\
 > script.sh

Windows – How to make a symbolic link with a relative path using mklink

Symbolic links are relative by default. You have to explicitly write a drive letter to make any part of the link absolute.

The general syntax for a symbolic link is:

mklink link destination

So, to create a relative symbolic link: link is going to be a path relative to your working directory, and destination is going to be a path relative to link.

Examples:

1. mklink link.txt ..\destination.txt

This creates a symbolic link for link.txt which points to destination.txt one folder up.

You can move link.txt around, and it will always point to destination.txt one folder up.

2. C:\>mklink A\Link.txt ..\Destination.txt

This creates a symbolic link C:\A\Link.txt for C:\Destination.txt

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Batch Update Symbolic Links Recursively

Windows – How to make a symbolic link with a relative path using mklink

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