Enable an option to force the use of symlinks in place of hardlinks for the purposes of incremental file backup. I know they do not function the same way and are not inherently interchangeable, but it would likely dramatically improve things for myself, and anyone else backing up to destinations where hardlink support is flaky or non-existent.
Even to get support for this option for the sake of testing (as opposed to being properly baked into the settings UI of a formal release) would be awesome! And apologies if such a thing already exists - I looked hard and didn’t find anything and the option to use symlinks during incremental file backup (in the advanced tab) apparently has no effect for me, even when testing with very large amounts of files and deep directory hierarchies (maybe I’m misunderstanding its use??)
Some background, in case it is relevant: I use StableBit DrivePool for my server data storage. It uses a virtual NTFS volume which cannot support hard links.
The devs as StableBit have admitted they have stopped trying to add hard link support - their implementation of NTFS is basically incompatible with it at a fundamental level so that is a dead end - it will never be supported. However, pretty much all other NTFS-based forms of reparse points are supported, including symlinks.