Restic doesn't restores symbolic links

upsidedown · March 24, 2022, 6:34pm

I’m using Windows 10 and restic 0.12.1.

I’ve made a restore a couple days ago that just finished, after restoring some file metadata with other tools I just found out restic didn’t restored any symbolic link and according to the documentation it should. Am I missing some commands here? I know restic has saved the symbolic links because I can see them with ls but I can’t get it to restore them.

The command I’m using is symply restore with nothing else (well, with rclone):
restic -r "rclone:<REMOTE>:restic" restore --target=N:\ <snapshotid>

Thanks.

alexweiss · March 25, 2022, 8:08am

If I interpret it correctly, restoring symlinks is not implemented for windows, see

github.com

restic/restic/blob/master/internal/restic/node.go#L298

      
        
            		_, err = f.Write(buf)
            		if err != nil {
            			return errors.Wrap(err, "Write")
            		}
            	}
            
            
	return nil
            }
            
            
func (node Node) createSymlinkAt(path string) error {
            	// Windows does not allow non-admins to create soft links.
            	if runtime.GOOS == "windows" {
            		return nil
            	}
            	err := fs.Symlink(node.LinkTarget, path)
            	if err != nil {
            		return errors.Wrap(err, "Symlink")
            	}
            
            
	return nil
            }

Nev · March 25, 2022, 2:51pm

This PR claims to add the Windows symlink restore functionality.

upsidedown · March 26, 2022, 3:42am

Thanks guys, can you provide me with a Windows build with said PR merged?

upsidedown · April 12, 2022, 1:46am

so I tried building restic with that patch but I’m getting erros with ISO files with access denied. All I did was go run build.go

joistef · April 13, 2022, 12:08pm

Hey @upsidedown

You might want to take a look at Relica. It was developed by Matt Holt, author of Caddy Web server, CertMagic and more. It’s built on restic but preserves advanced files such as symbolic links and dotfiles.

There’s a good explainer already posted, although the software has been updated a few times since: