Hardlink Symlink unRAID Concept Tutorial

Hardlinks, Symlinks and Cross-Seed! What does it all mean?!
Simple terms: Both shortcuts / symbolic links - but the hard link doesn't break so easily! Watch the video to find out why.

[@benbou]

Years ago I used hardlinks on Windows, and I remember that both "files" needed to be on the same physical drive in order to avoid data duplication (taking twice the size of the file).
Is this also true in unRAID?
Because it’s much harder to figure out where the references will be written, because of the share system… Or maybe it will always be created on the same disk since additional references take virtually no space?
Then, will moving one reference with a tool like unbalanced duplicate data, or will all references follow?

[@TechTails]

unRAID is a different beast entirely to Windows. Yes - in windows if you moved across different drives, data would duplicate. unRAID handles everything without duplication by referencing the disk shares as necessary across the array and making the links within the same disk share as the file that you are attempting to hard link. As for "moving references" not sure why you are talking about multiple / all references. That is more to do with soft linking/non-hardlink. Why would you even try to make multiple hard links to the same data? Makes little sense and I feel you're theorizing too much here. Hard links you can move around but they only ever point to the original data. They cannot point at each other anyways. If you move or delete any hard link, it doesn't affect the original file or other hard links. Each hard link is treated as an independent entry pointing to the same data.