ELI5 - Why shouldn't I use hardlinks?

Self-Hosted & Services Unraid
1

I have Unraid setup with the usual *arrs, torrent and usenet downloaders. I have my media storage shared and mounted on a separate Plex Box.

I have the *arrs set to create a hard-link to another, more organized folder (also in order to keep seeding the torrents.)

My very basic understanding of hard-links is that they are two separate pointers to the same inode(?), allowing me to have a nice organized library folder without changing the actual download name in the download folder.

I have seen several mentions in Discord of turning off hard-links, but I don’t totally understand the reasoning. It sounds like it creates some sort of issue?

Can someone explain why I shouldn’t be using them and also, how then I should be handling downloads?

2

Did you ever figure out why? I can’t think of any downsides unless you have so many files as to run out of inodes.

3

I have not figured it out. I turned them off anyway, because all the cool kids said to. But I am still curious about the issues it could have created.

4

I am right there with you, I used hardlinks back in the day quite often with my hardware RAID system. It was especially useful for renaming torrent downloads without having two separate copies of the data on the physical disk just like you mentioned.

I can’t think of a single reason why this would cause problems with unraid, personally. I could see it potentially being an issue with data backup software that doesn’t properly handle hardlinks, perhaps.