I have backed many Windows systems in the past using Linux. Today is the first time I am attempting a Windows Vista system.

Apparently, Windows Vista uses symlinks all over the place, and they are symlinks to fully qualified pathnames (generally this is a very bad idea IMHO - not the symlinks, but the fully qualified pathname part). For example, if I go to /mnt/sdb2/Users, I see things like "All Users -> /mnt/sdb2/ProgramData"

So when backing up "Users" via , I have many symlinks to a fully qualified pathname, which includes the mountpoint, "/mnt/sdb2". Well, in the future if I mount this backup, the mountpoint may not be /mnt/sdb2, and then all the symlinks will be dead. Is there some way to have the "cp" command convert to relative symlinks rather than fully qualified pathname symlinks? For now, I am just using which follows the symlinks rather than leaving them in place. I don't like this, but at least it gets all the files copied instead of a bunch of possibly dead symlinks. When did Windows start using symlinks anyway? I didn't think it was smart enough for this (indeed, it is not smart enough to use relative pathnames evidently). Not to mention that having "c:\Users\All Users -> c:\ProgramData" is a kind of brain-damaged symlink naming/use convention IMHO.

I was just wondering about this Windows symlink thing. In the past, on older versions of Windows, I don't remember every running into symlinks. I was only planning on backing up c:\Users, but with these new symlinks pointing to who-knows-where in Windows, I may need to backup all of c:\ instead. For all I know, there may be some symlink buried deep under c:\Users that points to c:\Windows. A backup of the entire disk is not what I originally wanted to do.

I tried this in the past, and it ended in tears because linux incorrectly translated some names. Keep tar out of it.
the cp command to use is
That way, you don't get /mnt/sdb2 in the pathname. I would give consideration to restoring, and backing up. It would be easy to end up with an unrestorable backup. Also bear in mind that if you change filesystem type at any stage, you may have difficulty preserving permissions. If you copy to ext4 and back, it will try to set the ext4 permissions on return.