Cannot copy a link to an external device?

[tchomby]

If you make a link in Ubuntu (by right-clicking on a file or folder and choosing Make link) then you cannot copy that link to an external device. Nautilus will say: Error "Operation not permitted." Grsync seems to just silently skip them.

This is bad because it means that links cannot be backed up. And links may in fact contain valuable user content. For example a friend of mine has all his poems stored in one folder, and he has a number of other folders for different publishers, inside each publisher's folder he keeps a bunch of links to the poems which that publisher has a copy of. This is how he records which publishers have which poems. But now we cannot backup this data. I backed up his entire homedir to an external drive using grsync, but he later discovered that all his links were missing from the backup.

I'm thinking about bug reporting this as I think it's a usability issue.

So, does anyone know why you cannot copy a link to an external device? And is there a way around it?

Thanks

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