This reminds me of an old story: a user backup all his documents by burning them into a CD, only to get his IT department discovered he only backup desktop shortcuts instead of the real file.

This is the main difference between hard links and shortcuts. The above scenario won't likely to happen with hard links (because they're actual files). As with jcromartie, I have a really hard time explaining that hardlinks are not shortcuts even to programmers.

I can't imagine my dad (hell, even my brother) will ever going to understand hardlinks. He don't even understand how shortcuts works (only how to use it).

>I have a really hard time explaining that hardlinks are not shortcuts even to programmers.

While the distinction is important to programmers and sysadmins, the average end-user treats shortcuts as if they were hard links, it would not make the UI more complicated to change the 'make link' behavior to hard-link instead of sym-link.

Yes it won't, but when you have to introduce the concept of multiple files could point to the exactly same data on the hard drive and no, it's not a "copy" of that file, it's rather mind-blowing.