Symlinks and Backups

[Solotak]

I'm confused about symlinks and hardlinks, especially when it involves backups.

I have 120gb SSD (E:/Photos) partition that is photos hdd. I ran out of space on that ssd so new photos are now stored on another ssd. The other photos are located in a different SSD (D :/Data/Photos/)

I would like the folder(s) (D :/Data/Photos/Trip[X]) appear inside (E:/Photos)
i.e (E:/Photos/Trip[X])

If i make changes or delete any files on D :/ i want those changes/deletes reflected on E:/. I also want this viceversa so if i happen to edit/delete any photo i was exploring on (E:/Photos/Trip[X]) those changes/deletes will also happen on the original (D :/Data/Photos/Trip[X]).


I'm just confused with the information out there whether i need a symbolic link, hardlink or something else?

What makes this more confusing is that i want to backup (E:/Photos/) to a NAS and i want it to backup (E:/Photos/Trip[X]) and treat that folder as a real folder. So on the NAS it would be (Z:/Photos/Trip[X]).

I want something easy so i don't screw this up. Apparently Link Shell Extension is good http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinks...kshellext.html but i just don't know which option to choose that will be right for what i'm dealing with.

Please help =)

 

[Mushkins]

I don't think symbolic links were really meant to be used the way you describe them, and honestly i'm not seeing any benefit to the solution you're proposing but a lot of possible pitfalls.

The safest way to do this would be to forgo symbolic links entirely. Just put a shortcut to D:/Data/Photos/Trip[X] inside E:/Photos, and make sure your backup solution is configured to back up both D:/Data/Photos AND E:/Photos. I'd personally be too paranoid that backup software or windows itself are going to handle the symbolic links funny and do something crazy like say the backup was successful but not actually back anything up, and it sounds like these photos are important enough to you to that I'd want to play it safe.

Is there a specific reason you *need* the filesystem to pretend all the images are in a single folder on a single drive? You could always try simply creating a symbolic link from D:/Data/Photos to E:/Photos and test it out. Run a backup, restore from backup, etc to make sure it's working. The pathing should work (ex. typing E:/Photos/Trip[X] is valid and will take you there), but I don't remember if Explorer will display the folders/files without further tweaking (ex. navigating to E:/Photos, you may not see a Trip[X] folder as if it were flagged hidden).

 

[Solotak]

Thanks for your suggestion. The reason why I wanted these separate folders to appear under one main folder is for simplifying backups. I don't like having things all over the place and figuring out which folders were left out because they were located in different hdd's.
I want to back these photos into a NAS under one main NAS://BACKUP/PHOTOS folder.
The other reason i wanted symlinks is to access the NAS/Backup/Photos folder for remotely browsing my photos from the internet.

Placing a shortcut would only backup the shortcut file, and not the contents of the real folder. Yes i could create another backup profile for D:/Photos/ but it will be located outside of the MAIN NAS://BACKUP/PHOTOS. Why? Because The E: backup profile will delete any files/folders that are in destination but not in source and hence delete D: backup, unless the backup points outside the folder eg. (NAS://Backup/Photos_D). Which makes browsing the photos remotely chaotic as there will be duplicate photo categories located in 2 folders. Eg. NAS://Backup/Photos/Travel and Nas://Backup/Photos_D/Travel

Lastly, I want to snapshot just one directory (PHOTOS) with one checksum file so i can compare file integrity on both source and destination.

It would be better to just replace with bigger SSD's, unfortunately these are internal to laptop and are not easy to replace because of sony's proprietary connectors and i will eventually upgrade the laptop in a year or so.