On a Windows 11 machine, if I backup an NTFS hard drive to another NTFS hard drive, and the source hard drive contains lots of hard links, will the inodes get copied to the destination drive such that the hard links on the destination hard drive now point to the new inodes?
Background: My current drive has tons of symlinks but no hard links. When I backed it up, the symlinks no longer worked (I’m not trying to solve this problem, as I realize I should have known that before). and I was told I should have used hard links instead of symlinks. I’m thinking of converting all the symlinks to hard links, but before doing so, I wanted to get some assurance it will work after the conversion.
Note, in my case, ALL the hard links will be copied, but I’m also curious to learn what would happen if I only copied some of them. I’m also curious to learn how this same operation would work if I was copying everything to my OneDrive (is OneDrive considered a different file system?)
I also reviewed several similar questions on SuperUser, such as this one but none of the answers addressed the inodes and they were all over 10 years old. Also, they mostly addressed tools, such as robocopy, that take care of such copies, but I’m not looking for a tool. When the time comes, I’ll probably use drag and drop in Windows Explorer. If that doesn’t work, I’ll use copy or xcopy, whichever works, or write my own tool. I really just need to know what happens to the inodes.
