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I am using external hard drive to store all my data that have a lots of symbolic links. The file system is NTFS.

Now I would like to copy some (or all) of the information to other drive keeping the all file structure together with symbolic links so that they point to their new location on the new drive.

I have tried to use Robocopy for that but the copied symbolic links are still pointing to the older drive. I think that maybe I am missing something with the relative/absolute paths of the files but unfortunately couldn't find any parameter for that in Robocopy.

How can I achieve this?

Please note that this is 1TB HDD and it takes long time to copy and it is not an option to make an intermediate copy or tar archive.

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I had a case like that, it was a cocktail of some issues related to copying symbolic links, share permissions, and long filename, I tried Robocopy, troubleshooting, and some tools, all was crapy in this situation. I saw a helpful thread in this site asking about a solution for long path names, and a user recommended software called Gs Richcopy 360, now 6 months using this SW, and I can copy symbolic links (many choices), no long path name problems appear and NTFS / share permissions copied successfully. take a look at the software and its capabilities

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    Are you affiliated with gsrichcopy360? You sure mention it a lot on this site.
    – Mast
    Commented Sep 6, 2020 at 13:25
  • funny! , my experience with this software has 2 ways, first in my company from 3 years till now and was just a user, not admin .. the second way is using it as a personal use from 6 months in my home. The funny thing is that I was working in the company and not knowing that the program can handle all these issues. just one post here made me get my personal version. Excuse me, I only speak about what I understand and can talk about.
    – SaraWellyIT
    Commented Sep 6, 2020 at 13:56
  • Explaining HOW to use this tool to complete OPs need will make this an answer. Right now you've just said "use this tool" and that sounds like an ad, whether it is or not.
    – music2myear
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 1:35
  • Do not get me wrong. Gs RichCopy does have some shortfalls. You cannot drag and drop nor the wizard offers all the features. So it assumes you are a techie. When I first started I was supporting a remote office with road warriors so mainly worked with the software on windows workstations to backup their machines to a central server. However, I have sense joined the IT team and use the software to replicate and migrate servers. This is a whole different beast from workstations to servers.
    – SaraWellyIT
    Commented Sep 8, 2020 at 9:08
  • As a user, I did struggle in the beginning to get it going. As a techie, it made a lot more sense but may be because I used it for a long time I was able to pick it up. As an answer of how can the program do it, just Set the job to copy from source to destination, as it copies it should update the symlinks to the new location.you can make a test using the trial version.
    – SaraWellyIT
    Commented Sep 8, 2020 at 9:11

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