Is there a way to create hardlinks to create a duplicate of a folder on the SAME drive (NTFS formatted)? I am looking to do something like this: XCOPY E:\TEMP\SAMPLE1* E:\TEMP\SAMPLE2\ /s but INSTEAD of actually copying the files and using up the extra drive space, just create hardlinks to the files.
Goal: there are only a handful of files that we do not need in the SAMPLE2 folder but want to keep all of them in SAMPLE1. The folder SAMPLE2 will eventually be copied off to another drive.
NOTE: the total content of SAMPLE1 is about 400GB (with multiple sub-folders contained therein) and each of the files that we are going to exclude from SAMPLE2 is about 20-40MB each (there are lots, 100+ files, located in various sub-folders).
So is there a way to do the equivalent of XCOPY (command above) except use hardlinks, and then we go and remove all the files we don't want in SAMPLE2 before copying them off to the external drive; then deleting SAMPLE2 folder.