Symlink Windows [new] Access

She deleted a symlink. She meant to delete a pointer. Instead, she deleted a database.

The recovery tool couldn’t follow the symlink back. It was gone. The real files, the ones she thought were safely elsewhere, had been inside the symlink’s target all along—but without the symlink, she’d lost the address. Worse, because she’d deleted the link itself (not the target), the data remained untouched on D:. But she didn’t know that at first. symlink windows

A single command in an elevated Command Prompt, and suddenly a folder named Current appeared inside her E: drive, even though nothing physically lived there. It was a mirror—a ghost. It pointed to the real folder on C:. She could open it, save files into it, delete from it. Everything changed in the real place. And no duplicates. She deleted a symlink

Then the trouble started.

Maya had a tidy mind. Her Windows desktop was a grid of neatly named folders: Work , Archive , Old Projects , Receipts . But her hard drive was a tangled mess of duplicate files—photos saved in three places, scripts copied across directories, a report that existed in both Work and Archive but never seemed to match. The recovery tool couldn’t follow the symlink back