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Is it possible to migrate many folders into one network share in windows? (Server 2012 R2 standard) I only need read access

Example:

d:\pictures\
e:\pictures\
f:\pictures\

to

\\server\pictures\


I'm currently doing this on a linux machine with symlinks which works pretty well actually. I am running a cronjob that add symlinks to /media/share from each subfolder of each picture folder on each drive /media/driveX/pictures/. There are no duplicated names in the subfolders.

I need now a additional windows machine.
Actually my plan was to set-up a type 1 hypervisor to run windows and linux parallel. But while thinking about I get the idea to migrate the existing linux machine into windows.

Uhm yeah and when you are curious why:
I've distribute my files over many drives since I don't and won't use any kind of raid. When one drive crashes this would be annoying but OK.

Btw: I'm aware that windows can't read from / write to linux filesystems.

Oh and I don't want to use windows server drive pools / storage spacing

1 Answer 1

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NTFS supports symbolic links too, it's pretty powerful filesystem.

From Wikipedia:

The mklink command is used to create a symbolic link. It is a built-in command of cmd.exe in Windows Vista and later.

In XP, junction utility by Mark Russinovich is capable of working with reparse points, now offered by Microsoft as a part of Sysinternals suite.

Full wikipedia article: link

You should also read windows help, just type mklink /? in command line.

By default - you need admin rights to create sybolic links, so your script in task sheduler must be set to run from account that belongs to Administrators group.

If for some reasons you want to create them as user who is not in "Administrators" group - read this: link.

(post was edited and cleaned after discussion below)

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  • Well first thanks for this hint. Didn't know that. Well let me try to explain it with other words.. I want to access all my files with a single network share. Even when the files are on different physical drives. See the example above. Makes this sense to you? :)
    – Brettetete
    Sep 6, 2014 at 22:45
  • @Brettetete He just showed you how to do that. Take some time and learn about the command mklink. That IS what you want. You're going to create a new share and then within that share make links to your other folders. Then they can all be accessed through the new share.
    – krowe
    Sep 6, 2014 at 22:48
  • I don't understand how you do that in linux, I mean one folder pointing to few locations. What if you try to write into that merged folder?
    – Kamil
    Sep 6, 2014 at 22:54
  • It was my understanding that he is wanting to migrate this to a Windows machine. Regardless, if he can mount all of the file systems to his file server file system then he can do this with soft links. Weather he wants to use mklink.exe in Windows or ln in Linux it isn't going to make much of a difference. Also, this isn't a merge, he is adding these other shares as children to the main share. Meaning that he'll have, \\myserv\myshare\d, \\myserv\myshare\e, and \\myserv\myshare\f. Each of these are distinct paths and there is no ambiguity as to where they point to.
    – krowe
    Sep 6, 2014 at 23:04
  • well that's actually not totally true what @krowe said but that's of course my fault. I am running a cronjob which is adding each subfolder of each pictures folder to the share folder in form of symlinks. (there are no duplicated subfolder namings) Well and I only need read access. I've really missed that one in my question. Sorry for that! But yeah, I guess I'll accept his answer since it's the way how I do it right now. I'll let this question open for a while though.
    – Brettetete
    Sep 6, 2014 at 23:07

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