Symptoms
If you were a previous user of ADMe and updated your Avamar S/W to 7.x
or
You are a new user of ADMe starting out with Avamar S/W 7.x an higher
The staging or recovery phase of a migration can fail if a reparse point exists and points to location outside the intended staging path directory which will always be the case.
Pre Avamar 7.x systems recovered a reparse point as a folder and the files it pointed to were recovered to this folder therefore reparse points were not an issue.
Avamar 7.x now supports the ability to recover reparse points as links and is now its default behavior and its associated files will be placed in the target location pointed to by the link. This behavior is not compatible with the ADMe use case which is doing redirected recoveries to a staging server.
Cause
Pre Avamar 7.x handling of a reparse point resulted in the link being recovered as a folder rather than a link and the files it pointed to were recovered to this folder. Avamar 7.x now offers three possible recovery options for a reparse point as shown below the 3rd of which is the new default behavior and is potentially incompatible when doing directed recoveries as used by ADMe.
1. linksasfilesfolders
2. linksonly
3. linksandtargets
Resolution
There are two ways to ensure the appropriate recovery behavior is used with ADMe.
1. Add the following syntax to the Windows staging server avtar.cmd file located in <Avamar-Install_Folder>\avs\var folder.
When multiple MCS threads are being used there will be additional var folder named /var2, /var etc.
If these extra threads were established using the tool wthreads2.bat, it will insert this option automatically to each avtar.cmd file.
--reparse-restore-option=linksasfilesfolders
2. Include the following syntax in all Windows Job Policies on its Migration_Flags line.
-avflags reparse-restore-option=linksasfilesfolders
Additional Information
If you were a previous user of ADMe using incremental staging any reparse points would have been recovered as a folder. If you attempt a new recovery using ADMe after upgrading to Avamar S/W 7.x without implementing this solution you may encounter a failure when the recovery tries to recover the reparse point as a link but a folder by that name now exists on the staging disk.
Retry with this solution in place and if this fails on a reparse point recovery you will need to format your incremental staging disk allowing it to reestablish the incremental baseline with the reparse points recovered as folders.