USB drive backup and symlinks

[jca]

My HD is formatted exFAT and I make backups under Windows. When I first used the Arcade Organizer File explorer complained about a file not being found and stopped copying files. No big deal: I just exclude the _Organized directory from the backup as everything can be rebuilt using the Organizer script. With the GBA2P and Gameboy2P I used symlinks and I also intend to do the same for favorite games. This will make impossible to make a backup. I searched the internet and found Far Manager and also xcopy in binary mode. Both methods allow me to do a full backup but sadly my symlinks are no longer symlinks, they are just text files.
Does anyone know of a solution?

[paintbox]

Did you try actually restoring from the backup? I don't think Win supports unix symlinks, I'm not sure what explorer thinks a symlink is but text file is somewhat reasonable. If they have .txt extensions that's probably wrong, but if it's just that Windows wants to open them in a text editor you should try restoring a test folder and see what happens. It could work.

I know I've used rsync to correctly restore symlinks in the past, but between linux machines and probably always between the same file system. I'm not sure what complications win/ntfs might introduce to a linux/exfat backup.