Inherent in NTFS is the ability to do what is called a junction point these are essentially a pointer from one folder location to another folder. Junction points are an important part of the application compatibility story for Windows Vista, but you probably didn’t know it.
In order to minimize the amount of application compatibility problems users would experience due to the change in folders names, such as C:\Documents and Settings moving to C:\Users, Microsoft employed junction points. These junction points make it so that hard coded reads and writes to legacy file locations would automatically go to the correct new location without changing the application.
Getting to the point:
If you come across a folder that has a shortuct looking icon, like Documents and Settings folder in the screenshot below, this is a junction point. Clicking on it gives you an access denied…so where are those files really at?
The easiest way to track down the real location of the files is to start a command prompt and change to the directory that contains the junction point and do a “dir /a:s *.”. This will display all system objects in the current directory which will include your junction point and the location that this point refers too. Wala, now you know where the files really are.
So what is the point?
Knowing about junction points will be very important both from an application troubleshooting and an evaluation standpoint. Particularly when you are talking about apps that enumerate or scan the entire system. If a backup program doesn’t know how correctly deal with junction points then you could end up with two copies of the same data in that backup. Not only are you wasting disk space, but also a large amount of time as profiles tends to be rather large. Additionally, Anti-Virus applications which typically include periodic system scans could end up taking an inordinate amount of time because they will essentially be scanning many of the same files twice.
Posted
Sep 28 2006, 05:19 PM
by
Josh Phillips
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