Talk:NTFS reparse point

For files?
Can someone please give a source for this? I haven't seen anything - except MS's own products - that can set a reparse point for a file. Up to now I have only come across this for directories!
 * NTFSlink, an Explorer plugin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.162.14.84 (talk) 04:41, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yep Vista introduced NTFS symbolic links, which use the same generic facility (NTFS reparse points) as junction points. --Assarbad (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Hard links to folders/directories?
The text says:
 * [NTFS reparse points] also can act as hard links, [...] they can point to directories on any local volume.

However, I have not found any evidence that hard links can point to folders. I have only seen them point to files, and I have not been able to create a hardlink to a folder.
 * Peter (talk) 23:41, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Hardlinks cannot point to folders on NTFS, that's true. I think there is a sort of confusion here in that they can functionally act as hard links, but semantically they have little in common with hard links. --Assarbad (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

The text says:
 * NTFS HARD link - since Windows NT4 - files on the same drive. DON'T USE.

I don't understand the DON'T USE comment at all. This is a supported, documented feature of the operating system. Just as with Unix hard links, the behavior of hard links with writable data is hard to predict, but that doesn't mean we should recommend not using them (we make sure we only use hard links with read-only data, which is a recommendation I would echo for Unix). They're very hard for users to use, but we have systems that use this very widely in production with hundreds of people using both Samba and Window Server file servers.

Leovitch (talk) 01:52, 8 November 2010 (UTC)


 * For the side-by-side assembly (SxS) stuff Microsoft itself is using this. Hardlinks have already existed since at least NT 3.51. I have tested that myself since  has always supported creating them (even though this was only semi-official). --Assarbad (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

The text says:
 * NTFS HARD link – since Windows NT4 – files on the same drive...

It's not clear if this is on a physical disk or whether Hard Links can span a partition across multiple disks or even over a SAN or disparate mediums partitioned as one NTFS partition

2.98.206.25 (talk) 22:56, 27 June 2012 (UTC)


 * "Same volume" would be the appropriate terminology. For most practical purposes a volume is identical with what is elsewhere called a partition. It's just that in some configurations a volume can span multiple physical disks. --Assarbad (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

This article is largely considerably less wrong after 7 years
What does mentioning hard links even have to do with reparse points except that both are file system entities on NTFS? They are completely unrelated. Quite frankly whoever wrote this seems to have had no insight on what's going on. Even the comparably shallow "Windows Internals" by Russinovich provides a better source for these topics.

By no means do symlinks on Vista and later *replace* junction points. They have different semantics.

This article should either contain all the details under NTFS -> Reparse_points and more. There is no good reason to have an extra article NTFS symbolic link when all the NTFS entities implemented using the reparse point facility would be joined into this article and the factually wrong stuff would be culled from this. The only reason I am not editing it myself is because there is likely going to be some admin who sees it as "destructive" and rolls back sane changes to the current wrong state.

The sentence *Enabling cross-host symbolic links requires that the remote system also support them, which effectively limits their support to Windows Vista and later Windows operating systems.* gets repeated. Why? NT4 and even NT 3.51 contained an API to create hard links - it's still in as of Windows 8 - its name is MoveFileEx. Yep, the docs say the respective flag is reserved, but it has worked ever since NT 3.51. I tested it when Vista was the newest Windows version.

TL;DR: all of the hard link references are rubbish and don't belong into an article about reparse points on NTFS.

Apologies for the strong words, but this is truly one of the worst WP entries on a topic I know of I have ever read --Assarbad (talk) 00:40, 12 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Never apologize for telling the truth!! This is a typical crappy, unreliable wikipedia article.
 * I came to this talk page to complain that the term "reparse point" is never defined in this article supposedly about reparse points. The term appears only in the lede, where it is described as "an NTFS file system object".  I read the entire article, and I still have no idea what a reparse point is.
 * Articles here are written by whoever the hell wants to, modified by the ignoranti, and experts are actively hounded away if an idiot with an admin friend disagrees with them. The articles about anything people have strong opinions on are completely worthless, and the technical ones (like this) are often either incomplete, wrong, so poorly-written that they're unreadable, or written in jargon so dense that it can only be understood by people who could have written the article themselves.
 * And Wales? Wales doesn't give a sh. it as long as he can lecture at colleges for 5 grand an hour, fu. ck co-ed groupies afterwords, and wipe off his dick with $100 bills.  Plus, he needs the retarded editors and crooked administrators to run his faux encyclopedia for free.
 * Dave Bowman - Discovery Won (talk) 19:07, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

The TL;DR: still applies even now. And I also find the use of the term "soft link" suboptimal. For example:

Directory junctions are soft links (they will persist even if the target directory is removed)

This depends entirely on the level of awareness any software has for junction points. For example if the software is unaware it may use a means of traversing the junction point (which it sees as a directory), deleting all files and subfolders, before deleting the junction point itself, leaving an empty target directory. And I am not exactly sure what the point is supposed to be about junction points (directory junction is redundant as junction points only ever support directories) being soft links. For example if this is supposed to be in contrast to hard links, the remark in the parentheses is totally irrelevant as unlinking a hard link will also just drop the reference count and leave any remaining "target file" intact - unless the hard link count drops to zero.

Then in the next section we have:

Symbolic links (or soft links)

... which is a nice claim, but there is no definition of what a soft link is. I think it would be worthwhile to simply point out that symbolic links are sometimes called soft links, but then the whole point about "directory junctions" being "soft links" is even more confusing.

In the brief above the TOC we have:

They also can act as hard links, but aren't limited to point to files on the same volume: they can point to directories on any local volume.

... which seems to be imprecise. This may be functionally true (considering deduplication and so on), but it's an odd comparison and other than the effect of enabling deduplication there isn't much these specific types of reparse points have in common with hard links semantically. --Assarbad (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

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DLT relevance?
I question if the DLT feature uses reparse points at all. Looks like little more than a GUID stored in the file metadata. No reparse points involved here.--Henke37 (talk) 00:55, 28 November 2020 (UTC)