Avamar: ADMe staging fails due to the presence of reparse points

Avamar Data Migration enabler ADMe 

• Previous user of ADMe and updated your Avamar S/W to 7.x
• New user of ADMe starting out with Avamar S/W 7.x a higher

The staging or recovery phase of a migration can fail if a reparse point exists and it is located outside the intended staging path directory which is always 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. Reparse points were not an issue.

Avamar 7.x now supports the ability to recover reparse points as links. This is now its default behavior and its associated files are 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.

Pre Avamar 7.x handling of reparse points 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 third 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

There are two ways to ensure that 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 Management Console Service (MCS) threads are being used, there is an additional var folder named /var2, /var, and so on. 
If these extra threads were established using the tool wthreads2.bat, it inserts 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

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. This failure happens when the recovery tries to recover the reparsed 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 must format your incremental staging disk. Allowing it to reestablish the incremental baseline with reparse points recovered as folders.