MicroNuggets: Hard Links versus Soft Links Explained 

Glad it was helpful!

Entirely true!

Right🎉

Agreed, do you have an example of practical usage for these two concepts?

Hard Link -Space saving and data consistency: Suppose you have a large data file that needs to be accessed from multiple locations or by different users, but you don't want to consume extra disk space by creating copies. Hard links can be a good option here, as they will allow you to access the file from different locations without duplicating the file content. Plus, any modifications to the file content will be consistent across all hard links, since they all point to the same data. Backup purposes: Hard links can be used in some backup strategies. If you make a backup of a file by creating a hard link, and later make changes to the original file, the backup will still contain the original data. This can be handy for creating "snapshots" of files or directories at different points in time. Symbolic Link (Soft Link) -Linking directories: Only symbolic links can be used to link directories. So, for instance, if you're organizing your music files and want to have the same directory appear under multiple genres, you could use symbolic links to achieve this. Cross filesystem linking: If you need to create a link to a file or directory that resides on a different filesystem or partition, you'll need to use a symbolic link. Versioning systems: Soft links are often used in versioning systems. For example, in a situation where you have different versions of an application, you can create a symbolic link named "current" that points to the directory of the version currently in use. When you want to switch to a different version, you just need to change the symbolic link to point to a different directory. Broken Link Situations: There are cases where you might want a link to survive the removal of the original file. With a symbolic link, the link will remain (but will point to a non-existing file), and you can replace the original file later without needing to update the link.

Thank you so much 🙂

Hi Kanel, thank you for your comment! We're glad you enjoyed the video. We recommend checking out this blog post on our website for more in-depth information into hard versus soft links: www.cbtnuggets.com/blog/certifications/open-source/linux-hard-links-versus-soft-links-explained

You can find the same great videos on the website!

Glad to hear it! You've got this!

Thank you, Arash!

Watching the video again this guy seems to think the hard link file doubles the storage used, which it doesn't. The video has some serious flaws resulting from his misunderstanding of how this works.

Glad you liked it, thank you for watching!

There is only one real file no matter how many hard-links there are. If you duplicate a file five times, it takes five times as much space, and you can change any of them and that copy will change without changing any of the others.

Glad you liked it, thank you Parker!

Andro Id analogy: think of two people living at the same house . If you do reno(like edit) then both have to live through the reno. Now if one person decides to move , the other person will still live in the same house - the same address .

I'm actually looking for that answer. I can say soft links are used as a short cut, you don't want to type absolute path when it's really long, instead create a soft link and use it to navigate. I still didn't understand the purpose of a hard link.

@@azharahmed7588 when you give your pc to your evil sister or evil friend, they can't go in sudo "original file" But they may delete hard link file

Glad it was helpful!

Glad it was helpful, R B! Thanks for watching the video.