Avamar - Backup of a dataset containing many broken symbolic links runs slowly

An Avamar backup of a dataset which contains many symbolic links is running slowly.

The are many entries in the backup log which show we are backing up symbolic links:

2021-10-21 21:26:35 avtar Info <16280>: Not traversing 'E:\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\someotherfile.zip' since it's a 'REPARSE_USER_SYMLINK_FILE' and 'dereference' flag not specified

Logging entries show that symbolic links may be broken:

2021/10/21-15:50:34.96600 [avtar]  GetReparsePointInfo() 'E:\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\folder\file.exe' does not have a resolveable target

The data was previously hosted on another drive, which had been replaced and reconfigured.

The backup dataset included a directory which contained over half a million symbolic links.

When avtar detects a link as broken, it reports "does not have a resolveable target".
In this scenario, the behaviour occurred because the drive had recently been reconfigured.

The act of checking a symbolic link and finding that it is broken introduces a long delay. The backup took around 9 hours longer than normal when attempting to scan these (half a million) broken symlinks.

This appears to have occurred even though the backup was not configured with --dereference.

The dereference flag instructs avtar to back up the target of a symbolic link

-dereference. 2014/10/21-15:50:15.90899 [avtar] --dereference NOT specified, not adding any Cross-Volume Symlinks to freeze volumes list.

The folder containing the broken symlinks (~0.6 million) was excluded from the backup.  

The completion time was reduced from 11 hours to around 2 hours.