What is the difference between a hard link and a symbolic link?

As the above image shows a hard link is a direct link to the inode of the file it is linking to; the inode is the contents of the file. A symbolic link points to the name of the file, not directly to the inode. This means that symbolic links will stop working if the linked file name is changed, whereas a hard link holds the contents of the linked file and so will continue to work if the linked file name is changed or deleted. Symbolic links can also point to directories where hard links can point only to files.