Hardlinking for Dummies

So I guess I know what a hardlink is, but I’m confused by the value of it in Sonarr (and am now realising that I’ve got the settings.

If we hardlink a file that has successfully downloaded, and later the torrent is deleted from the torrent client - wont the hardlink die too? Realising that I’ve set hardlinks ON what I guess is going to happen now is that when I go through and purge some old torrents in a couple of weeks, media will start disappearing too?

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how to logically configure the two (torrent client, deluge, and sonarr) around a private tracker that requires seeding. Any torrent that comes down with the media not in an archive (eg: file.mkv) will stay in whatever destination folder Deluge leaves it in (either the download location or a ‘move to’ folder I designate), any torrent that comes down is set to auto-extracted (via Deluge) to a folder being watched by Sonarr Drone Factory.

If I set Deluge to not move torrents on completion (except for the auto-extract from rar when archives detected) is it as simple as me turning off the Hardlink setting?

I normally credit myself with being able to sort through little things like this, but I’m a bit lost.

No, that would be the case with a symlink, but a hard link is two files on disk pointed at the same data. A file on disk points to data, a hard link allows multiple files on the same volume to access the same data, deleting one headlinks will keep the data, deleting all the headlinks will delete the data.

No, it will stay there, because it’s still pointing at the data.

Jeez. I’ve spent too much time away from nix.
That and I should have re-read my question :smiley:

Used BSD in 92, studied and developed on SunOS and VAX a couple of years after that.
Now I feel like a dinosaur with a memory to match hehe - a bit ashamed I’d forgotten the nature of hardlinks.

Righto, carry on then!

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