The question is, why do so many duplicate files exist? They exist, because MS did not have symbolic links before. So the "innovation" is just automatic compensation for previously missing symbolic links. They did it in the wrong order!
Maybe in five years we will read the following: Experience with the "single instance store" technique shows that often all the files in a system directory are linked. So to save additional storage space, the idea came that whole directories could be linked. In a two year work five engineers of MS expanded the file system to allow also such links.
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The question is, why do so many duplicate files exist? They exist, because MS did not have symbolic links before. So the "innovation" is just automatic compensation for previously missing symbolic links. They did it in the wrong order!
Maybe in five years we will read the following: Experience with the "single instance store" technique shows that often all the files in a system directory are linked. So to save additional storage space, the idea came that whole directories could be linked. In a two year work five engineers of MS expanded the file system to allow also such links.