Junction points & symbolic links keep being recreated. How to clean reparse points / folder metadata?

[fattipants2016]

Quote

 

Windows 11 Pro x64 22H2 2261.1265

Drivepool 2.3.2.1493

 

I've encountered/solved this problem once before, but I don't remember what ended up working.

I used to have a junction point E:\Downloads, which pointed to C:\Downloads.

I deleted this junction point, and created a new one E:\Downloads, which now points to D:\Downloads.

Every time I reboot my computer, the junction point gets replaced with one that points to C:\Downloads.

If I create an empty folder E:\Downloads and reboot my computer, it also gets replaced with a junction point, pointing to C:\Downloads.

If I delete E:\Downloads and reboot my computer, I can create a new folder E:\Downloads, which immediately gets replaced with a junction point.

It's as if there's some 'old' drivepool metadata that doesn't get cleared out when I delete the folder/junction point.

E:\ is my Drivepool. C:\ and D:\ are physical disks, which aren't part of the pool.

Is there any way to tell Drivepool to do housekeeping, and blow out this old metadata for folders/junction points which no longer exist?

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Reparse point information is stored in the .covefs folder in the root of the pool.  Worst case, delete the link, remove the contents of the .covefs folder, and then reboot. 

[fattipants2016]

I'm not brave enough to try that remotely, but I'll give it a whirl over the weekend.

To be clear, just backup/blow up the entire contents of the .covefs folders, and let it rebuild?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yup.

[fattipants2016]

Well that wasn't terribly exciting. I expected DrivePool to complain or explode or something.

The .covefs folders on a few of my drives had wonky permissions from being migrated between computers, so I'll bet that was the issue.

It appears to have fixed my problem.

Thank you!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, we try to not do anything too tricky/weird, as it mostly just causes more issues down the road.  So "not exciting" sounds about right.

And yeah, migrating could cause permission issues, in some cases, so I'm glad that this has fixed the issues!