Why are some symbolic links data files backed up?

[arachnaut 2]

In the previous versions of Retrospect and the latest version 8 I have seen this behavior - data files of junctions made with the 'mklink' command get backup up unnecessarily. I have Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit.

 

I have a script that I run that makes MD5 hashes of all the files on my drives. The end result is a file that looks like this <drive>-date>@<time>.md5 (for example):

C-Drive-2012-02-01@10-11-31-110.md5

 

After each run, the file symbolic link is created, in this case:

C-Drive.md5

 

The command that does this in the script looks like this:

mklink %_symlink% %_target% 1>nul

 

I notice that some of these symlink (junction/reparse points) files get backed up in my nightly incremental backups.

 

I don't know why they get backed up - they don't change until I run the disk utility again - which I do only rarely.

 

Also, the symlink is not backed up - the data file is backed up.

 

And finally. not all of these get backed up - I have 14 drives set up this way, but only a few get backed up.

 

Attached is a composite image that demonstrates it, In the first part I show the backup set sessions for three cases: a nightly automated backup, followed by a test example of two backup initiated manual just now, one after the other. Overlaid on that is the detailed Windows explorer view of these symlinks. (I deleted the U drive symlink after the nightly backup).

[arachnaut 2]

I tried this again. I deleted all my symlinks and re-generated them.

 

Then I ran Retrospect to backup the new links.

 

Then I ran it immediately after that twice.

 

Each time all the symlinks (actually the data file that the symlinks pointed to) where backed up.

 

This doesn't seem right to me.

 

Examples attached.