That’s kind of funny, because Microsoft do something similar with WinSxS. Only worse. What they do is store packages in the winsxs folder. They then do an NTFS

That’s kind of funny, because Microsoft do something similar with WinSxS. Only worse. What they do is store packages in the winsxs folder. They then do an NTFS hard link to where the component is installed, usually system32. If you ever used Vista and Windows 7 and started to run out of disk space over time, that’s because Microsoft never used to remove the old components after they were updated. In Windows 7, the initial plan after SP1 was to allow people to use a special switch on DISM.exe to remove old service pack files. Microsoft removed the idea of service packs and instead did continuous patching with rollups. It seems to taken them quite some time before they twigged to the fact that the old updates were using up a lot of disk space, because a long time later (almost at the end of the Windows 7 lifecycle) they added a Windows update to the disk cleanup wizard. Even worse, it would only remove the components after you rebooted but before you could login to Windows. If you ran it, it could sometimes take literally hours to get the computer to finish removing files from the component store.