Error Code 4390: The file or directory is not a reparse point. (CreateSymbolicLinkW)

Posts: 2 · kadsf 8 Aug 2015, 22:42

I am using seagate central personal cloud to back up my USB drive on a windows 8.1 PC.
USB drive letter is X:.
Seagate personal cloud's Public folder is mapped on PC as drive W:.
Drive X has a folder called "other" at its root which is a symbolic link to another folder on drive X i.e. "other" is a symbolic link to X:\1\2\3\other.
Drive X has many other folders at root.
When I FFS X:\ to W:\, all other folders are synced OK but while copying the "other" folder, get
Can Not Copy Symbolic Link
"X:\Other" to
"W:\Other"
Error Code 4390: The file or directory is not a reparse point. (CreateSymbolicLinkW)

I am running FFS as Administartor and on the windows PC I have run
fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 R2R:1 L2R:1 R2L:1

Any help would be appriciated.

Posts: 2481 · Plerry 9 Aug 2015, 06:06

It seems you are using the "Direct" method for Symbolic Link handling (see Help-file).

If all else fails, you might try to create the Symbolic Link W:\Other yourself (once),
pointing to W:\1\2\3\other, and use
* the Exclude method for Symbolic Link handling if \1\2\3\other is included in the sync.
* the Follow method for Symbolic Link handling if \1\2\3\other is not included in the sync.

Posts: 7230 · Zenju 9 Aug 2015, 09:35

The symlink on X is detected and read just fine. But for some reason creating the symlink on W is not working. Maybe ERROR_NOT_A_REPARSE_POINT (4390) in this case is returned because the cloud storage does not support symlinks.

Posts: 2 · kadsf 9 Aug 2015, 14:33

I tried manually creating above mentioned symlink using mklink in a command windows and got the error message "The file or directory is not a reparse point."

Does this mean cloud storgae does not support symbolic links?

Posts: 7230 · Zenju 9 Aug 2015, 14:35

I tried manually creating above mentioned symlink using mklink in a command windows and got the error message "The file or directory is not a reparse point."

Does this mean cloud storgae does not support symbolic links?kadsf

Exactly. It's unfortunate however that the Windows API returns such a misleading error code. Something like "operation not supported" would have been more clear.