How to repair the symlinks in a copied cygwin64 tree

[David Karr]

At my work, I had to have my laptop reimagined for various reasons. I had
them save my cygwin64 tree to external storage first. I now have the laptop
back, and I copied the entire tree back in, but now I realize I should have
done this differently, and I'm wondering how best to repair this. Some of
you can probably guess, but now all of the files that were symlinks in
Cygwin are now very small data files. I can tell they used to be symlinks
because when I cat one, it shows "!<symlink>" in the first characters.

What is the best strategy for repairing this? The most simple-minded
approach that I can see is simply renaming the cygwin64 tree to get it out
of the way, and then just reinstalling Cygwin, and then copying in all the
files in my cygwin home directory in the saved tree. I will likely guess
wrong on what packages I had installed before. Is there some way I can
simply repair the symylink files directly?

Besides the symlink problem, is there anything else that I might have
broken by doing it this way?

I'm guessing the correct way to have done this would have been instead
storing the "tar czpf" output in external storage. I think that would have
preserved the symlinks and restored them properly with "tar xzf".