I have the following use case and am struggling to decide whether to use hard links or symlinks. I store e-books in a "Books" folder on my Win 10 Laptop.
However I have a directory structure per Project and would like to also have the relevant books in some project directories. Copying would waste space so a link is preferred. I could go with either a hard link or a symbolic link ( thinking of using the Link Shell Extension )
But I am confused which would be preferred, hard or symbolic. Or any other approach.
One relevant point is that I take "simple" full backups every month by physically copying the docs folder to an external Hard drive (and deleting old backups manually every few months). Would either of the options (symbolic vs hard) have an impact on this way of backing things up?
At some point in the future I am also thinking of just moving my entire drive into Dropbox for continuous backups. Again, would the hard-vs-symbolic decision impact this choice?
21 Answer
Most utilities can't make the difference between hard links and files in a Windows environment. You would need to ask your backup software manufacturer how he handles hard links. If he does not his software will blow up the size of your backup.
That could apply to your Dropbox quota as well although Dropbox might not be affected internally because they would get back the additional storage spent by you using a technique called "deduplication".
If your use case is just about finding books by clicking on symbolic links in Windows explorer using symbolic links might be sufficient.
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