Hard vs. Symbolic links

Doing a bit of research, here’s my interpretation of the differences between hard and symbolic links.

In a Unix file system, files are made up of one or more Inodes. An inode is a data structure used to represent a filesystem object. Or in layman’s terms, an inode has a way of organizing and storing data in a manner that when it’s time to accesses the web server’s file system, it accesses the file system efficiently. You can create and read contents of files, determine if a directory or file exists, etc.

A hard link creates another file, in the same file system, with a link to the same inode. More than one filename can reference the same inode.

A symbolic link is a link to another name in the file system. A noteworthy difference here is that symbolic link can be in a totally different file system since it’s the same name as another file. To be considered a hard link, they have to be within the same file system.