Defrag and symbolic links in Windows 7
Solution 1:
For a defagger to work, it has to have a reasonably detailed knowledge of the file system as you can't reliably de-fragment a file using file-system-independent APIs.
For example, a defragger for NTFS will normally use the unique/canonical MFT record ID instead of the arbitrary path and, as such, it will not even consider the symbolic link a "file".
Also, reparse points, junctions and symbolic link (variant) are included in NTFS as early as Windows NT 4 (for active directory support), so most defragmentation software should be aware of them now.