It is surprising how many people don’t know about symbolic links and do not realize how useful they can be. For instance you are running a test server with multiple instances of out shop configured as separate installations. You can easily update the source code by pulling it from a common repository. But what if you need to update you media files, which normally are not under version control? And what if there are tens of gigabyte of them? You don’t want to copy the files to each installation, instead copy them into one folder and set up symbolic links for the media folders of your test sites:

Creating a symbolic link (syntax):

ln -s [TARGET DIRECTORY OR FILE] [SHORTCUT]

For example:

ln -s /var/media /var/www/vhosts/test01/media

ln -s /var/media /var/www/vhosts/test02/media

and so on…