Backup of junction points not working (symbolic links do work)

I’m stumped. I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out.

I had a backup job happily working on Computer #1. I moved the job over to Computer #2.

All is good on Computer #2 except that junction point targets are not being backup up (the directories are empty). Symbolic link targets work fine. (I’m referring to targets, not to the junction point / symbolic link files themselves.)

I do have symlink-policy = Follow.

Any ideas?

Hello

do you mean that junction points are working fine on #1 but not on #2 ? or do you have junction points only on #2 ?
I did a quick test and files under junction points seem to be backed up by Duplicati. I was expecting symlink-policy to have no effect in this case, but it does.

I moved the backup job over unchanged from #1 to #2. The targets of all the junction points are backed up properly on #1, but are empty on #2.

I can’t see it being relevant, but #1 is Windows 10 and #2 is Windows 11. (I’m moving from using #1 as my main computer to using #2.)

I guess I could change all my junction points to symbolic links, but I prefer to use the former. There are only a dozen or so, though, so if there is a good reason to change to symbolic links I could do so.

Windows 11 is supposed to be a ‘new’ operating system (beside the pastel tones and the rounded corners). Unfortunately, I don’t have a quick and easy access to a Windows 11 system to confirm or not.

An Internet search has not given much joy about junction points and Windows 11. Junction points are an old feature, and not much known, so Windows 11 x Junction points x CSharp application x ‘complaining on the open internet vs just using something else like symbolic links’ could have a low intersection even given the massive use of Windows generally.

If you want to try to debug the thing, maybe you could rig a simple test backup with minimal data and run it with full debug (verbose) to see if it brings some more info.

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Well, that was interesting! I turned on debug as suggested and that fixed the problem. Even after I turned off debug, the problem is still gone.

I’ve tested with a new tiny backup job created today as well as with the one I have been using all along (and which had the problem yesterday).

Of course I don’t really believe that turning on debugging fixed the problem, but I have no idea why symlink-policy = Follow is working now but didn’t yesterday.

Thanks for your help, @gpatel-fr.