Windows® Home Server Bible

Chapter 12. Understanding Shared Folders

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using shared folders

• Accessing built-in shared folders

• Accessing personal shared folders

• Adding shared folders

• Removing shared folders

• Duplicating folders

If you have networked home computers, undoubtedly you've had times when you needed access to files located on one computer from another one. Quite often this can be a headache-inducing experience — folder sharing in Windows can be complicated, especially when it comes to sharing files across different versions of Windows, or with users who don't have an account on each computer. It's also easy to lose track of which folders are shared on each computer.

Windows Home Server aims to change all that with its shared folders feature. While sharing folders over the network has been available since Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, it's never been as easy to set up and manage at a glance as it is now.

With shared folders, you create, remove, and set properties for all folders directly from the Shared Folders tab on the Console. You can see at a glance the status of all shared folders, what they are for, whether they make use of folder duplication, and how much storage is used on them.

To top things off, in many cases you don't even need to create shared folders, as Windows Home Server automatically creates them for user accounts and even provides built-in shared folders for everyone to use.

Note

When reading about file servers and other specialized devices that offer shared folder services, you will ...