In the Windows ecosystem, a is a directory entry that allows a single file on an NTFS volume to have multiple paths or names. Unlike a standard shortcut, which is a separate file that "points" to another location, a hard link is a direct reference to the file's data on the disk. How Hard Links Work
They are useful in file management tasks, allowing for multiple references to files without extra storage consumption.
– You want multiple names for the same file content, on the same NTFS drive, without any overhead, and you understand that changes are shared.
fsutil hardlink list "filename"
Or use PowerShell:
A hard link is essentially a name for a file on disk. When a file is created, Windows assigns a unique identifier, known as an inode, to the file. A hard link is simply another name for the same inode. This means that multiple hard links can point to the same file data on disk, but they all refer to the same inode.
mklink /h C:\path\to\new\link C:\path\to\original\file