If your synced folders contain symbolic, special, hard links or reparse points, then you may wonder if these will be synced with your Cloud drive.
As a general rule, these links are not supported and are automatically excluded.
Syncing symbolic links (symlinks)
The first time the app detects a symlink, it adds an exclusion rule, and all future symlinks are silently and automatically excluded.
This happens in both Smart and Advanced mode.
Syncing special links, hard links and reparse points
Special and hard links and reparse points are automatically excluded in Smart mode.
In Advanced mode, you’ll be asked in the Sync issues dialogue whether to ignore each one – however, once ignored, these are added to the exclusions rules. You can also add them to the .megaignore file.
Notes regarding reparse points
The desktop app can’t sync reparse points because it is just metadata. MEGA relies on data fingerprints for synchronisation, and the app can’t calculate the fingerprint of a reparse point because they don’t contain any data.
Issues with OneDrive
Some providers, such as OneDrive, offer a “files on demand” feature. If the MEGA Desktop App tries to sync such a folder, reparse points will be detected and a sync issue will be triggered even if the files are no longer being synced with OneDrive.
In theory, OneDrive should clear the reparse points from a directory after the sync has been unregistered, however, this is often not the case.
For troubleshooting of OneDrive attributes causing sync issues, we recommend the following Microsoft articles: