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Topic: Soft and hard lisk for archive organization (Read 3149 times) previous topic - next topic
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Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

I want to organize my music into directories in different ways (with respect to genre and a simple directory including all albums). For that purpose I'd have used soft/hard links in UNIX. I know there's shortcut under Windows for the same purpose but is it the same thing? Can I burn shortcuts onto CDs preserving the association?

I run Windows XP Pro on NTFS drive.
The object of mankind lies in its highest individuals.
One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

Reply #1 –
HardLink does this.

Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

Reply #2 –
I installed it but didn't run perfectly. So I found these instead: Hard Link Magic and Junction Link Magic.

Junction Link Magic is the exact thing I was looking for. Now I categorized my archive "By Title" and "By Genre". You also need Junction, MSDOS based program. Removing junction points are easier that way. Junction Points is for folders as opposed the usual hard links for files.

NTFS supports soft and hard links via "Reparse Points" but Win2K or XP comes with no tools to create them:

Quote
Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own junction-creating tool: Junction. Junction not only allows you to create NTFS junctions, it allows you to see if files or directories are actually reparse points. Reparse points are the mechanism on which NTFS junctions are based, and they are used by Win2K's Remote Storage Service (RSS), as well as volume mount points.
The object of mankind lies in its highest individuals.
One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

Reply #3 –
Hardlink is workin here quiet good. No problems found. I'm on Win XP.

Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

Reply #4 –
Be careful, NTFS5's hard link feature is *most probably* safe, but there are a few concerns still:
- Which defragmenters are aware of it ?  No clue...
- Which backup/burning tools are aware of it ?  None...

It seems Microsoft only supports the features most people use, and don't care about the rest. Most publishers aren't better:  try asking Executive Software whether Diskeeper supports hard links 

That's a pity, because NTFS itself is quite good. There's just the fragmentation issue.
 

Soft and hard lisk for archive organization

Reply #5 –
Quote
- Which defragmenters are aware of it ?  No clue...
- Which backup/burning tools are aware of it ?  None...

I think the junction links works as a soft link (because when I rename the directory name it points to, it no longer works), therefore there's no issue of defragmentation probably. I think the default Microsoft defragmenter would have no problem because there should be some companies using it. I'll try with PerfectDisk sometime. But I didn't give it a shot yet. Backup Utils might indeed fail. I googled such things but couldn't get any information on how to copy/edit the links, etc.
The object of mankind lies in its highest individuals.
One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.