Ln – NTFS hard/symbolic link command line tool (opens in new tab)

While bsdlove's comment wasn't that great, were not most Windows users not using NT until Win2k, and even then, sym & hard links weren't useful, since you needed (and continue to need¹) administrative privileges to create them?

¹excepting the recent change where a "developer mode" can be activated, but that still doesn't make them useful on an end user's machine, or to an end user.

.. but not with a standard command-line tool shipping with the OS to create them. Which was kind of an odd decision.

And finally out of beta.

Ah I'm confusing it with rsnapshot. I'd assumed they were the same. I'm confusing incremental with differential I guess.

Are you running rdiff-backup in cygwin? How do you find it deals with the ntfs ACLs? I'm looking for a way to do incremental full-disk backups that leave the files on disk in a "natural" state, with their original pathnames/ACLs/ADSs and not in some weird archive format. Although I suppose rdiff doesn't count as "weird" being as its open source and well supported.

TBH I'm quite liking the look of the windows built-in backup function, I like the idea of the shadow copy service and storing disk images as VHLs. Booting into the backups in virtualbox sounds cool.

The problem is that the "Previous Versions" get stored on the primary drive, not the backup drive, eating into my free space. Unfortunately one can't set it to use the empty space, it wants to preallocate. You also can't set a time interval, only a percentage of the volume.

As far as I can tell consecutive VHL images don't get stored as diffs or anything, they're separate, meaning I'd really only get one at a time.

Oh, come back Time Machine, all is forgiven.

Word of warning on those backup systems: occasionally run a full-checksum/file-contents sync in case of corruption.

It's a different issue. I sympathize that you can't really back up files with Cygwin and maintain the same file attributes (it's certainly not impossible for them to do it while maintaining a POSIX nature -- FreeBSD and illumos have no issues with NFSv4 ACLs, which are a superset of all the NTFS ones), but as far as making sym- or hard-links to files, Cygwin is perfectly fine.

(And let's not mind that NTFS is complicated enough that almost all native Windows tools won't backup it either. Your best bets are wimlib or dism...)

Support for symlinks in Windows 10, at least, just got better (or rather easier) for those of us on the Insider Fast Ring: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/12/02/symlinks-w...