The recovery tool couldn’t follow the symlink back. It was gone. The real files, the ones she thought were safely elsewhere, had been inside the symlink’s target all along—but without the symlink, she’d lost the address. Worse, because she’d deleted the link itself (not the target), the data remained untouched on D:. But she didn’t know that at first.
So Maya discovered symbolic links.
Then the trouble started.
She wrote a note and stuck it to her monitor: A symlink is not a copy. It is a promise. Break the promise, and the filesystem won’t remind you where it led. Then she documented every single link in a spreadsheet. symlink windows
A single command in an elevated Command Prompt, and suddenly a folder named Current appeared inside her E: drive, even though nothing physically lived there. It was a mirror—a ghost. It pointed to the real folder on C:. She could open it, save files into it, delete from it. Everything changed in the real place. And no duplicates. The recovery tool couldn’t follow the symlink back