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While performing VMware File Level Restore (FLR),files are getting skipped with info: “Skipping symbolic link” for NTFS De-Dedupe Volume
While performing VMware File Level Restore (FLR),files are getting skipped with info: “Skipping symbolic link” for NTFS De-Dedupe Volume
Updated over 8 months ago

Problem description

Restore job is successful but the files are not restored at the destination.
Please check below 3 scenario to understand if this is due to de-dupe Volume on Source VM.

  1. Job logs says “Skipping symbolic link”. [2023-05-24 14:43:11,487] [INFO] FlrRestore: Skipping symbolic link [/mnt/flr_1069r/volume2/ServerFolders/Company/Departments/Accounting/Payroll Summary/2022/01-01-2022.pdf]

  2. We can browse through the files in FLR window but the files size shows “34 B” in case of a dedupe file.

  3. If we login to the proxy and navigate to the required folder then we can see unsupported reparse tag error for the deduped file.

    • Eg: unsupported reparse tag 0x80000013”

Cause

Source VM have De-dupe enabled volumes.

Traceback

[2023-05-24 14:43:11,487] [INFO] FlrRestore: Skipping symbolic link [/mnt/flr_1069r/volume2/ServerFolders/Company/Departments/Accounting/Payroll Summary/2022/01-01-2022.pdf]

Resolution

  • De-dupe volume is not supported for VMware FLR( Click Here )

Workaround

  1. Restore a Virtual machine Disk/VMDK ( Click Here ) and attached the VMDK to the source VM ( Click Here ) or

  2. Restore the full VM ( Click Here ).

Note:There are 2 basic requirements for restoring files from VMDK having dedupe enabled volume on any VM other than the source VM:

  1. The Data Deduplication feature must be enabled in the Windows server.

  2. The OS version must be the same as the source VM. It may or may not work with older or newer versions.

See also

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