It appears symlinks have not been followed anyway. I have reported that earlier when that was an issue, here its actually better. I want the symlinks, just like they appeared on the original location. But the symlinks have been re-written, presumably to save resources at the server end. Also this was found earlier. But now that is a problem, because not only are permissions broken, so are the links. Note that if i restore such an individual link through urbackup, it is restored with the proper permissions and pointing to the proper resource. The problem is ofcourse, there are tons of symlinks inside the prefixes, which are now all broken.
In the meantime i have spent hours attempting to recover the data, finally it looks like it has been succesful; basically i did what was described here, although a bit different. I had a template Debian 12 machine ready and cloned that, used virt-customize to change its hostname and inject the client installer for my desktop, and added a significant disk to the vm to mount at the target path (all under /media/gamesnvme). Stopped urbackupclientbackend on my desktop, booted the vm but forgot it already had the client installed. Apparantly urbackupsrv seen it appear on the network momentarily, and now it seems the name for the template i had changed to “recover”, the hostname i gave the new vm. I suppose that will change back the moment i bring back online the template, but in any case its not a biggie. I did have many issues starting the restore though, i kept running into this until i decided to change the settings to “server-confirms” and just try via the web gui. And guess what? The restore seems to happen without messing up the virtual machine. Lateron i will mount the vm’s qcow locally via qemu-nbd and copy back the data, finally!
So all in all, this --no-follow-symlinks does not appear to exist, maybe you are developing a new client and mixed things up? I would really love to see one would be able to restore data for another host, instead of having to “impersonate” the original machine.
The failed attempts are all “Error creating directory blabla recursively”, the top three just finished while using the webgui. So the issue in this thread is completely related to my desktop. I need to see if this other issue where symlinks arent followed is particular for my setup. My guess is it has something to do with the complexity of the stack; luks, crypt, snapper, mounted subvolumes, etc.
Anyway, im happy if you want to close this, this seems related to my machine in particular. But please consider adding a feature to the restore to be able to do that on a host different from the original, thanks.