[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
Microsoft® Windows® 95 shell shortcuts include heuristic link tracking that uses a tree-search algorithm to find a likely match for a moved link source. The search algorithm is based on the last known path of the file as well as file information that includes the creation date, the file size, and the file name and extension. OLE linking includes the same heuristic link tracking. Windows NT 4.0 also includes the same heuristic link tracking with some added improvements in searching name spaces to yield results in some common scenarios. The improvements include the following steps subject to time limits imposed by the client application:
These link-tracking schemes are transparent to the end user. However, they do not always yield positive results and can be time consuming.
Windows NT 5.0 adds a new distributed link tracking service for the Windows NT File System (NTFS).