Deleting dangling symbolic links on Win7 fails

[wkornewald]

Hi,
I'm using FreeFileSync on Win7 x64, running the app as admin, so I can sync symbolic links (i.e. real symbolic links are generated on my backup drive). Now on the source drive I've deleted a folder that contained relative symbolic links pointing to other directories within that deleted folder. When syncing (mirroring) the backup drive it can happen that FFS first deletes a symbolic link's target folder and then tries to delete the symbolic link. This fails because FFS tries to resolve the symbolic link, which fails because the target doesn't exist, anymore. Instead of failing, FFS should simply avoid resolving symbolic links and instead only look at the link's target path.

Could someone please fix this bug?

Thanks,
Waldemar

[Zenju]

FFS doesn't resolve links that are going to be deleted. Can you describe a minimal test case that demonstrates this problem?

[wkornewald]

Finally, the bug reappeared and I can reproduce it. I'm mirroring the source tree to my backup drive. I've deleted a folder that contained symlinks from the source tree. On the backup drive, "dir" in a console window shows the following symlink (among many other entries):

<SYMLINKD> somedir [.repos\somedir\somedir]

During sync, FFS first deletes the .repos folder and then aborts with the following error:

Cannot open directory "somedir".
Error Code 2: The system cannot find the file specified. (openDir)

All subsequent syncs abort with the same error. So, it looks like FFS does try to resolve links at least on the target (i.e. the backup drive).

[Zenju]

Thanks for the details! In the meantime I've already found and fixed the bug. Here's the new beta for testing:
[404, Invalid URL: https://freefilesync.org/FreeFileSync_6.13_beta_Windows_Setup.exe]

[wkornewald]

Thanks, I can confirm that the bug is fixed now. :) Happy holidays!