Altap Salamander Support Forums

I just discovered something that I didn't like... With Windows 7 there are massive folder links for legacy purposes -- i.e. "Documents and Settings" is linked to "Users" and "All Users\Application Data" is linked to "AppicationData"... etc.... Because of a virus, I created a clone of my OS drive to an external drive. Once I re-installed Windows 7, I wanted to copy the data off the drive so I created a folder on the new C: drive called restore. And then used Altap Salmander to move all of the files off the "backup" into the the c:\restore folder. I then notice a couple of hours later that all my programs in the start menu was missing. Salamander copied the contents of the link instead of just copying the link. Had to do a system restore to recover from this. How do I prevent Salamander from traversing the links?

Thank you,

George Worley

32 or 64-bit Windows?

I doubt the Windows bitness matters. Salamander just isn't smart enough about all types of "hard links".

mdruiter wrote:Salamander just isn't smart enough about all types of "hard links".

Actually, junctions (which are used for this) are more like symbolic links. (But I guess you meant "hard" as an opposite for Explorer's .lnk files.)

@gworley, have you noticed if there were any '(5) Access is denied' errors during the backup and/or restore? From what I've seen, traversing these junctions is purposely blocked in the ACL's. These errors are usually a good sign of the unexpected behavior you've described. Anyway, I completely agree that Salamander's not well equipped for copying of junctions (though deleting is handled correctly by unlinking).

FYI:
There is a new sysinternals utility Findlinks you might find usefull.

Or a GUI way, Link Shell Extension (LSE).

And Nirsoft's utility, NTFSLinksView.


> '(5) Access is denied'

That would be expected, normally.

I have fixed this problem, sorry for delay. When Copy or Move finds link (junction point, symlink, or volume mount point), you can choose if you want to follow the link and copy files and directories from link target or if you want to skip link target and just create empty directory. Newly it cannot move content of link and so clear link target, it can only copy content or skip it.

It will be available in beta 3 which will be released this month.

Petr Solin wrote:it can only copy content or skip it.

Please, also allow to duplicate the link where possible (dependent on volume and file system of target)

The Link Shell Extension homepage has some useful material on this.

SvA wrote:Please, also allow to duplicate the link where possible

+1