Saturday, February 4, 2017

windows 7 - What kind of links (symbolic, hard, junction pts...) for multiple cloud backups?

Google-Drive's MS-Windows software doesn't follow links of any kind. Dropbox and Skydrive both - apparently, follow links. I am using MS-Windows7 64-bit professional edition.


What I did was to move my main work directory into Google-Drive's folder, and created symbolic link to it, in it's original path in C:. This was based on a blog post a read. However, I plan to also keep my work backed up in Dropbox (or Skydrive), so I was thinking of creating a symbolic links to the work directory inside Google-Drive folder, in Dropbox's folder.


However, while reading up about mklink command that is used to create the links, I realized that there are 3 kinds of links, i.e.



  • Symbolic links

  • Hard links

  • Junction points


On reading up a bit more, and drawing parallels (at least for Symbolic and Hard links), to the POSIX equivalent, I think I should be using Hard-links instead, and not Symbolic-links. This is because, I do not want an inadvertent "delete" of the physical directory inside Google-Drive folder, to invalidate the other 2 symbolic links (which would happen given the very nature of those type of links). Hard-links would use reference counting, and won't delete the directory from filesystem, until the last link is deleted. Am I correct in my thinking ? I've not understood Junction points too well, and it's advantages over the other two types, to appreciate whether or not to consider it.

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