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Mastonas

Member

Registered: 18 Feb 2015

Posts: 4

robocopy /SL - copy symbolic links - Bug?

Hello!

Recently I tried to copy a whole disk partition to another HDD. The source partition included symbolic links (junction points).

Robocopy offers a switch for copying symbolic links instead of the contents behind it. (/SL)

First notice when starting robocopy with this switch and logging its output, the /SL switch will not show up in the header information of the log file.

Furthermore, symbolic links are not copied, robocopy puts out an error (The system can not find the path) and creates a standard folder at the location of the symbolic link.

I used the following command line arguments of robocopy:
robocopy F:\ H:\ /COPY:DATOSU /DCOPY:T /E /SL /R:2 /W:10 /V /FP /BYTES /NP /LOG+:C:\rcopy.log

As anyone experienced this?
May this be a bug in robocopy?

Simon Sheppard

Admin

Registered: 27 Aug 2005

Posts: 1,130

Website

Re: robocopy /SL - copy symbolic links - Bug?

Which version of Robocopy were you running? (from the help text) and also which version of Windows?

Does the account runing the robocopy command have access to the destination of the symlink?

Mastonas

Member

Registered: 18 Feb 2015

Posts: 4

Re: robocopy /SL - copy symbolic links - Bug?

Actually, I'm not sure what /SL should do.
When I look at the log output with and without /SL it seems to be the same. It seems to copy the files behind the symbolic links. But it creates the symbolic link as folder, not as a symlink. This were directory symlinks from Windows system on C:

Windows 7 SP1
I just installed the KB2680906 robocopy update, which is linked on here: https://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

Also, Robocopy probably does not support junction points specifically:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comme … _junction/

Last edited by Mastonas (01 Aug 2018 22:30)