How cassandra is able to perform snapshot by hard link?

Question

Reading Cassandra documentation here, they say if JNA (Java Native Access) is enabled snapshots are performed by hard link.

I can't understand how a hard link can hold a point in time version of a given file since it's the file itself at inode level (at least the way I understand hard links, I may be mistaken).

Answer 1

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