Linux gives you two ways to make one file accessible from multiple paths: hard links and symbolic (soft) links. They work differently under the hood because of how Linux tracks files — every file is really an inode (a numbered data structure holding permissions, size, and block pointers). A filename in a directory is just a pointer to an inode.
For moving data around — backups, transfers, or bundling a tree of files into a single deliverable — Linux uses tar (tape archive) combined with compression tools like gzip and bzip2.
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