The description of --symlink-pollicy says: “Previous versions of Duplicati used the setting “follow”, which will cause symlinked files to be included and restore as normal files.”
Yet the follow option now works, the seems to mean it’s deprecated and may be discontinued. I need to have this option work, or I need to reconfigure all of my backups. So, my question is “what is the future for --symlink-policy=follow?”
Is there an official answer?
Thanks,
Gene
I do not have plans to change the symlink behavior. We have discussed ways to make it more granular (i.e. use follow in this folder, store in that folder, etc) but no change to the underlying methods.
The comment about “previous versions” is hinting that previously there was no --symlink-policy and Duplicati just ignored the fact that the entries were symlinks and just treated them as regular files/folders, which is what the setting follow does now.
That is as official as it gets 
Thank you, that makes me feel much better. Because this confused me I took the liberty of rewriting it as follows:
Use this option to handle symlinks differently. The “store” option will simply record a symlink with its name and destination, and a restore will recreate the symlink as a link. Use the option “ignore” to ignore all symlinks and not store any information about them. The option “follow” will cause the symlinked target to be backed up and restored as a normal file with the symlink name. Early versions of Duplicati did not support this option and behaved as if “follow” were specified.
Default value: “Store”
Thanks again,
Gene
I updated the text in the program to follow your suggestion: