Does or will exFAT support symlinks?

Question

I've just acquired a brand new laptop. Did split my ssd in 3 partitions, one for win7, one for macOSX and one shared data partition. I chose exFAT for this partition, but i did not find how to create symlinks on it.

With win7 mklink won't work. Any suggestions/ideas?

Should i have picked NFTS for this shared partition ?

Solution 1

Symbolic links are nowhere referenced in the exFAT feature list. Additionally I remember that NTFS symbolic links only work if source and destination are NTFS partitions.

May be it is sufficient to mount the shared exFAT data partitions as a sub-directory somewehere on the NTFS partition?

Solution 2

No

Soft links:

• NTFS Yes
• UDF Yes
• exFAT No
• FAT32 No

Reference: File System Functionality Comparison

Comments

[Olivier]

Unfortunately mounting as a subfolder does not allow to create a symlink using mklink.exe

[leden]

UDF does support symbolic links (soft links). See the UDF rev2.01 specification: osta.org/specs/pdf/udf201.pdf and another reference: diskinternals.com/glossary/udf.html

[Evan Plaice]

@leden Updated the answer to reflect the change