So your approach to this type of situation is to just sit there and conclude that you don’t understand the information, and that’s it?
You could easily search for information about that output, and you would find tons of it. But you don’t seem to do any of that, instead you seem to just want others to do the research for you.
This entire thread has been a series of “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand”, with very little sign of any research being done by yourself. That’s why you’re getting the answers you’re getting.
I used a search thingie to query about the output you got, since I don’t use Windows myself and I don’t have the problem you’re having, since I’m not trying to back up those files on the Windows systems I am involved in backing up.
Given the information I found, it seems like:
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The “file” is not really a file with contents, but an NTFS reparse point of type “app execution alias” (tag 0x8000001b / IO_REPARSE_TAG_APPEXECLINK). Hence, one of many Windows things.
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As you can tell if you had read the ASCII characters, this thing “points” to another .exe file, the AppInstallerPythonRedirector.exe one.
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So all in all, the way I understand this is that it’s simply a “file” (hence being called “irregular”) that doesn’t actually contain any data, but has metadata that says “when this file is run, instead actually run that other file”.
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I presume that this is Microsoft’s way of providing what looks like an application executable, but that simply is just a kind of “link” to another file that is supposed to install the actual application if the users seems to want it.
I’d like to remind you that restic is not a full system backup tool – it is simply not created in order to perform a full and complete backup of an entire operating system’s – in particular Windows, with all its quirks – files in such a way that you can restore the entire thing and just fire up the restored-to system and it’d be like the one you backed up. That is simply not what the goals of this software ever were.
If you want such softare, you ought to use one that is really created for it. Personally I’ve used Veeam’s software with good results. Of course those also has limitations, every software you find will have pros and cons and do and don’t do certain things. But you have to understand what the software you’re using is designed to do.
In this case, restic has not been designed to be fully compatible with all of Windows quirks, as it has started as a tool to back up files on more common platforms and with more common features. There has been Windows-specific features added, and a reasonable level of compatibility has made it fully possible to back up data on Windows systems as well – I and many others have done so for many years, successfully. But you’re trying to back up things that most people would, and already a few of us have, said that you probably shouldn’t even try to back up.
Even if you were to back those files up, you wouldn’t have a restorable full system anyway. So what goal are you even trying to reach here. Again, you need to take a step back reassess the needs, requirements and potential solutions at hand.
At the very least, you need to educate yourself on the factors involved in your use of the tool. For example what I did above, instead of just concluding that you don’t know, just research it. I for sure didn’t know what those reparse points were either, but I looked it up, and you could easily have done the same.
That said, I have a question for you; For one of the Windows clients you have there at your work, that was backed up using IBM Storage Protect, can you restore the C:\Users\admin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\python.exe file from the client’s backups and then run fsutil reparsepoint query on the restored file, comparing the metadata/output? It would be cool if you could verify if/that it is really actually backed up and restored properly by IBM Storage Protect.
I haven’t been able to find documentation that tells me this type of reparse point is supported in IBM Storage Protect. Maybe it is – it would just be cool to know.
It might be possible to add support for these irregular files in restic, it’s a matter of whether it’s sound to do so and if so someone doing it and maintaining it in the long run.