Déjà Dup

How does Deja Dup deal with symbolic links to other backed-up locations?

Asked by Aaron Whitehouse

Hello,

I am backing up a machine with a Windows partition that has photos in the Windows My Pictures folder. There is a link to this folder on the desktop in Ubuntu. I have set Deja Dup to back up this computer, manually including the "Documents and Settings" folder of the Windows machine. This means that there are two potential ways to get to those photos for the backup -- through the manually-specified folder, or through the link on the Ubuntu desktop.

To be safe, I excluded the link in the setup, but I would be keen to know what I could have expected had I not done so.

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Michael Terry
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Best Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#1

Symbolic links are not followed. They are backed up themselves, though (as symbolic links).

So it's probably a good idea to include the symlink too. That way, when you restore, your photos will be restored (because you specifically included them) and the link to them will be as well.

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Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse) said : 		#2

Thanks a lot, Michael.

That makes sense, though I can see how it could lead to things being missed that people expected to be included.

Perhaps a fancy solution to this problem would be to review the "included" directories for links and pop up a window saying "links to the following directories were found in your backed-up directories. Would you like to back up these folders as well?". Clicking "Yes" would add these directories to the "include" list.

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Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#3

Just as a followup, in 16.0 and on, the targets of symbolic links that you explicitly include or exclude will also be included or excluded.