Sun Microsystems SUN STOREDGETM 5310 NAS - Manual (Page 323)

Chapter 6 Checkpoints/Snapshots 6-7
6.1.2.3 Translation of File System Objects in Checkpoints
As previously discussed, because the checkpointing mechanism is applied to
filesystem blocks rather than filesystem objects, there is no special consideration for
the type of object that is checkpointed.
Hardlinks and symlinks in checkpoints will continue to have the same semantics
they had in the live filesystem at the time the checkpoint is created. To keep the
hardlinks unchanged, the directory entries referring to the same inode and the inode
itself should have the unchanged values. Also, checkpoints in all the disk blocks
continue to have their old values regardless of whether they are meta-data or data
block - all the hardlinks remain unchanged. Symlinks are merely data files that are
(probably) references to other objects - so the same applies to them.