In windows systems, is renaming files functionally similar to deleting them?

Question

According to my understanding of the Windows filesystem, a program can read a file according to its path, if this path is changed, then whatever program used to read this file, can no longer do so. This would mean that, to any programs in the windows system that depend on a file, the consequences of deleting and renaming a file must be the same.

The specific case that this answer depends on is an embedded system running on Windows 2000, the service provider manual guides the user to delete the files inside a folder. As a wary user, I simply copied the files to a path called "folder_backup", and left the folder empty.

During this operation, the system regressed and was unable to function correctly. So the service provider that wrote the manual was called. Their diagnostic was that the database was corrupted because there were 2 databases in parallel, pointing to "folder_backup" as the second database. To my understanding, the files inside "D:/folder_backup" would have been inert, barring the exceptional case of a program looking for folders starting with "folder" or reading all contents in the "D:/" file.

In what non-obscure ways can a renamed file still be accessed by a system, that would have otherwise been impossible were the file deleted?

Answer 1

Spoilt for choice really.

• Distributed Link Tracking.

• Hard Links.

• OpenFileById.

• MFT record numbers.

  ... and probably more. Whether it is sensible for an application to do any of these things is a different question, but it is certainly possible.

Answer 2

A renamed file can still be accessed by another program.

• One way a renamed file can still be accessed by another program is an environment variable that is set to the new file path by the same program that renamed the file. The program that wants to access said file uses the environment variable for the file path instead of a fixed internally set file path.

• Another way is for the file to be the only file in a specific folder. The program that wants to use this file knows that there should never be more than one file in that specific folder, but knows that the filename may change but the directory it belongs in will stay the same. The program simply just uses the first file it can find in that folder, which should always be that file. However this is not good practice and you are better off with an environment variable.

Failing that, some programs will automatically ask the user to locate the file before continuing to execute it's code