How are symlinks handled in Kopia?

Support
1

I’m a little unclear about how Kopia handles symbolic links. Suppose I’m backing up my home directory, and the following symlinks exist:

  • ~/a1 -> ~/a2
  • ~/b1 -> /nix/store/b2

Will Kopia recognize that there is a symlink from a1 to a2, and will that symlink be preserved on restore, or will a1 be treated as another copy of a2?

How will b1 be handled? Will b2 (i.e. outside the home directory) be backed up, or will b2 be stored as a dangling symlink to a path not in the backup? Does this change I have an ignore rule for /nix?

(My primary concern is that I use Nix as a build system, so there are a lot of build outputs taking up lots of space I don’t want backed up. These outputs are all stored in directories in /nix/store, but there are symlinks to them scattered throughout my home directory with varying names).

Thanks!

2

If I remember correctly, symlinks are not followed by default, so they are backed up as symlinks. They are restored while pointing to the original location (which may or may not exist).