HS Ln

HS Ln is a lightweight command line utility designed to help you create Hard Links, SmartCopies, junctions or SymbolicLink structures on NTFS volumes. According to the developer, the tool acts as a Swiss Army Knife that provides a quick and efficient way to create Hard Links and manage your files better.

Generally speaking, Hard Links refers to the file system representation of the said file that may have more than one path reference on the same volume. Considering that it is basically a mirrored copy of a file, it means that there is no need to duplicate it. The direct advantage is that you can save a considerable amount of space on your drive. For instance, if you need to use 5 hard links of a 5GB file, the space needed is only 5GB and would save 20GB space.

The downside of hard links is that they can solely be linked in the same volume and, of course, they do not work on other file systems like FAT. You need to copy it to another volume and create other hard links there, if necessary. On the plus size, in case you delete them, the data of the original file is not affected and hence, you are still able to access it.