My Music folder hidden in Documents on Vista

Do I need to keep the system file shortcuts of "My Music", "My Pictures", and "My Videos" that resides inside of the "Documents" folder of Vista? And what about the "My Documents" shortcut inside the User directory?

Why do these exist? They show up as regular files when I run robocopy job to backup my directory to a network drive and it's annoying...

 

Do they say "shortcut" in their properties? If they are really shortcuts, you can delete them. I've noticed since XP that some shortcuts like that appear from time to time. I think it may be some program I use, but not sure. But they are unneeded in any case.

 

They have the arrow over them, so they look like shortcuts. When I try to open them they tell me access is denied. I can only see them locally when I view system files. However, even though I tell robocopy not to copy hidden or system files, it still copies these, and then the show up as regular empty directories on my remote storage location.

Here's a screenshot.

 

OK. I don't believe that what you have there are shortcuts. They are symlinks (symbolic links). At least 4 (maybe 5) types of symlinks exist in Vista's new version of NTFS (most existed in XP, too). In Vista, in order to make many of the same paths work like they did in XP, symlinks are all over the place. They are not shortcuts, but the actual folder with a second address in the file system. C:\Users is the same folder as C:\Documents and Settings, for example, so the same path would get you there if you transferred some script from XP to Vista.

Though you can remove them, any app searching for those folders and looking in the old location like they were in XP, will not be able to find them. But this may never prove to be any problem, and they can be restored.

There are command-line tools available for managing these, like mklink.exe in Vista (no delete option) or Sysinternals' "junction".

You may want to try the beta of Junction Link Magic for Vista:

http://www.rekenwonder.com/JunctionLinkMagicSetup.msi

NTFS Link Shellextension is alo a useful tool. (This page explains links much better than I did.)