Resolved Robocopy not copying target of shortcuts

Trying to use robocopy to setup backups, not able to get it to copy the target of a file shortcut, it just copies the shortcut itself. Don't see any flags to turn that feature on, it says it works that way by default. Here's the exact command I've whittled it down to, dir1 contains a single shortcut that points to a file on another drive, dir2 is empty:

robocopy e:\dir1 e:\dir2

 

Why are you attempting to use a shortcut? Couldn't you simply tell robocopy to copy the "file on another drive" to "e:\dir2 "?

 

This problem started because I tried to backup the contents of my desktop folder to a backup disk. My desktop contains a shortcut to MyDocuments (both desktop and MyDocuments live under a folder called Mark). I expected the backup to contain the actual contents of MyDocuments, instead it only contained the link. You're correct, I could change my backup script to backup the directory Mark and exclude all the subdirectories I don't want to backup. But that's not the easiest solution, particularly since I'll have to go through the entire directory tree and see if this problem crops up anywhere else. It's also not the way robocopy is supposed to work (I think).

 

That's the question then. Is Robocopy designed to copy or read shortcut links?

 

As you say, 9 out of 10 times it might not be desireable to follow a shortcut, but every 10th time it makes sense.

Perhaps my expectation is colored by having used Unix, where tools like cpio have switches to choose whether or not to resolve a symbolic link or just copy the link itself. I did a fair bit of researching robocopy and there are many tech articles online that indicate it is capable of copying the target of shortcuts. Once I looked in the actual manual it's clear they don't mention the word shortcut, which seems strange, particularly since they discuss junction points and links. I was not familiar with junction points in windows, which seems to be a construct only used to link directories.

Anyway, this is not a showstopper for what I'm trying to do, just something I need to be aware of.

 

Thanks for help, I understand.