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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?

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  • A hard link is a filename. A file can have more than one hard link/filename. All files have at least one hardlink. A file is deleted when the last hard link/filename is deleted. Most files in C:\Windows\system32 have two hardlinks/file names. One in WinSxS and one in System32. A soft link is a junction, mounting a directory somewhere else. These are file system features. You are talking about in your question shell links which are shortcut files and only work in Windows Explorer. See docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/…
    – user1292580
    Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 5:54
  • PS Files can exist not in a folder. You create and open using a GUID. Also there are disk management functions (mounting a physical disk as folder) and network management functions that do pretty much the same as soft links.
    – user1292580
    Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 5:58

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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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  • Thanks! I agree. So if I use symbolic links, take a backup and then restore, say on another laptop later. Would the links still work? So long as the relative folder structure is the same.
    – curious_cat
    Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 13:08
  • I can't tell. Try it out! If you could backup a complete partition I expect fewer problems.
    – r2d3
    Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 17:45
  • @curious_cat: Assuming you went for symlinks, did you find a working backup solution that can actually restore those links properly? Thx!
    – Sz.
    Commented Aug 12, 2022 at 18:15

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