Options restoring large backups using Symlinks on Windows Server/Client

Hello everyone, first Thanks uroni to make urBackup available to all, I would like to contribute some information that I think for some people like me with little knowledge of “Symlinks” could be of great help.

Sorry for my English

Server: Windows Server 2016 (UrBackup 2.1.19)
Client: Windows 10 (2.1.15

EDIT: Forgot to mention I am using urBackup to do only Incremental File backups, after the first Full BK I just delete it from the web and them keep Min Incr BK: 2 and Max Incr BK: 3 and doing every 48 hours.

After reading the manual, FAQ and searching information in the forum, I realized that the best way to save backups is to use Symlinks, but I realized that when it comes to restoring the data, basically there are only two ways possible, the first downloading a ZIP file and the second doing a restore from the client (First the client must have the exact name that had before and then make one backup without data and then from the server is given the order to restore backup to the client ), Or so it was as I did.

But I was more interested in being able to copy the data directly from the hard disk of the server and transfer them manually to a usb, … so I searched in google, and I found this program called Goodsync that allows you to copy a folder with Symlinks to another with the normal data structure, Goodsync gives you three options (Ignore, Copy as is and Drill down) I have been testing with the option of “Drill down” option and it really works very well, except that inside the folder “Documents” I think windows has three Symlinks that you have to delete before using Goodsync so you do not copy everything by two.

Also to do a hard drive backup you can use the option “Copy as is” so you can also do backups keeping the Symlinks OK.

I hope this will help some people who are wondering how to copy Symlinks to normal data.

If someone knows any other better way to copy Symlinks to a regular format data, please post it here :slight_smile:

Thanks