Symbolic Link in Windows not behaving as expected

Question

I have kind of a weird problem with the symbolic Links in Windows:

First, a little background to this whole situation: We have a Domain Controller, where most of our data is stored, but we have two folders on a NAS for Sync purposes. Now, these two folders used to be on the dc aswell, but we had to move it to a NAS. The company didn't want to have any changes in how the Files and folders are organized so we used Symbolic Links. I have created a symbolic link for each one. Both are in a shared folder. It all works fine so far.

But here is the situation that I find myself in: When you click on the symbolic link folder (in the search bar in Windows Explorer) it gets changed from the Network drive (I:/) to the share on the NAS itself: What it should look like, what it looks like after clicking on the symbolic link ("Grossprojekte_")

The weird thing is, if I use the button to go up one layer, it works like expected, it stays on the drive (I:/). But clicking on the folder in the search bar changes it to a network location instead of in the drive.

Does anyone have a solution for this or is it intentional like that?

I hope I worded this ok, so you can understand.

Answer 1

Symlinks do store actual destination names. That means they work "okay" as long as the drive is ´i:´ on all Clients. My best guess here is that junctions may use an identifier other than drive letter and when you switch Explorer's, some of that identifying data isn't understood by the other Explorer. They obviously don't just use the name, or you would be able to make a junction to a mapped network drive, and you can't (UNC is absolute in Windows). In this case, both (UNC and local) path's will get mixed up and explorer will ... try its best.

Symlinks used like this a a source of emerging chaos. Symlinks are not the right tool to use here - maybe think about volume mapping. You can't (in most cases) even use the same ACLs on NTFS->NAS redirects, so your security concept ends just there.