How to Locate Reparse Points that are Preventing a Backup

With Windows 2012, if you want to backup to a network share, you might get a message referring to Symbolic Links.

“One of the file paths specified for backup is under a reparse point. Backup of files under a reparse point is not supported. Specify a file path that contains the destination of the reparse point, and then retry the operation.

Turns out that if you run a dir /a from a command prompt it will point to “Symlinkd” and that’s where the problems are. Given this, lets create a text doc with all the symlinks.

dir /a /s >symbolic.txt

This will create a text document that will let us know about all the symbolic links.

I then open this in Notepad++ and see there are nearly 33 Million lines. Fortunately Notepad++ has the ability to filter this out. Simply search for “symlink”.

In this case it looks like they are:

  • c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Planned Virtual Machines
  • c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines
  • c:\Users\All Users
  • c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines