I have an open question on disabling follow symlinks configured on the server. See the thread on these forums titled “Directory backup options do not transmit from server to client as expected”. Nobody has responded to that thread yet, as I type this response here.
It does appear that you can disable symlink following if you configure things on the client end.
On Linux, the client configuration program is named “urbackupclientctl”.
If you want to backup /home and NOT follow symlinks, you would enter this on the client:
urbackupclientctl add-backupdir -f /home
The -f option tells it not to follow symlinks.
You can verify if the settings are as you want by running:
urbackupclientctl list-backupdirs
You can see what other options that you can set on the client end by running:
urbackupclientctl add-backupdir --help
Unfortunately, once you start adding things on the client end, then that client ignores anything you try and set on the server end (per the documentation). So it appears that once you start configuring things from the client end, then you have to continue doing future configurations from the client end forever. I would imagine (hope!) that other clients, the ones that you did NOT run urbackupclientctl on, would still use the server configuration. But I have not tested this.
Note: I am not a urbackup developer or anything like that. I’m just a confused user looking to get questions answered like you. Unfortunately, sometimes answers never appear. The developer(s) are busy developing I guess, and the users here seem a pretty quiet bunch much of the time. Probably because this is the kind of forum that users probably wouldn’t visit routinely. Most likely showing up here only when they are initially installing urbackup, or if they experience a specific problem down the road and need help. Many thanks to the subset of users who seem to be hanging around trying to help people. I see a few names that I recognize from years ago. One of the main reasons I chose urbackup years ago was because of the possibility that it may not be supported/developed in the future. I looked at how it stores backups and concluded that even if the urbackup program gets abandoned and stops working, I could manage to restore files manually just by copying them from the directory structure that urbackup creates. This is also why I chose EXT4 as my storage filesystem rather than BTRFS or ZFS. I do not know those other filesystems (volumes/subvolumes/etc) as well as EXT4 and might have more trouble restoring from scratch (i.e. - without the urbackup executable).