How can cassandra take a snapshot using a hard link?

Question

Reading the Cassandra documentation here , they say that if JNA (Java Native Access) is enabled, snapshots are taken via a hard link.

I can’t understand how a hard link can contain a point in time for a given file, since it itself is at the inode level (at least I understand hard links, I could be wrong).

Answer 1

SSTable files are immutable, so any hard link will be the only state the file was in.