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I would like to create a share that appears to the user as a single share, however it is actually a combination of two separate targets.

I have a server with a D: drive that is backed up daily and is going to have recent projects, and the same server has a E: drive with older projects that are archived, read-only backed up to tape. There are several departments that have similar structures so I would like this to be more seamless than just creating shortcuts for all the folders. Also, there are cases as well where only specific files within a folder will be moved to the archive server, unknown to the user other than the read-only permissions.

Eg.
D:\Projects\2021\ActiveProject
D:\Projects\fileA.txt
E:\Projects\1999\ArchiveProject
E:\Projects\fileB.txt

My Share would look like this:
\\ServerA\Projects\
2021\
1999\
fileA.txt
fileB.txt

Basically the share would be a combination of the two locations.

I have tried a DFS namespace however it only shows shares from one of the two targets and not both...

jsun5192
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  • What do you mean by multiple locations? Does the network span across multiple physical sites? Are your users, that will access the shares, in a different physical site than the server that hosts the data? Or perhaps, do you mean that your data is located on different physical disks on the server? ‘it only chooses the server which is closet…’. In this case, what is the server? Are you referring to the DFS namespace server or the folder target server (the server that hosts the file share)? Are you using multiple namespaces and/or multiple namespace servers? Are you using replication? – Benjamin Hastings Mar 22 '21 at 00:24
  • Thabk you for your help.Data is on multiple disks, as in the example I provided, D and E. Servers are all located at the same site. DFS is only showing the shares for a single target (not server), so it shows either the archive data or the current data. It is a single namespace with two targets. Not suing replication as that defeats the purpose of the exercise. – jsun5192 Mar 22 '21 at 01:33
  • The problem with your setup is that the targets have different content. All targets need to have the same content and have replication set up between them – Benjamin Hastings Mar 22 '21 at 20:39

1 Answers1

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The problem is that your are trying to present files from different folders in the same folder on a file share. Like so.

\\ServerA\Projects\
----fileA.txt at D:\Projects\
----fileB.txt at E:\Projects\

I don't see how this could be done. You can do this locally with symbolic links but I think these will not work remotely on the workstation that accesses the file share.

What you can do is present folders from different locations within the same folder on a file share. Like this

\\ServerA\Projects\
----2021 at D:\Projects\2021
----1999 at E:\Projects\1999

The solution with NTFS junctions would look like this:

Create a file share

\\ServerA\projects at D:\Projects

Create a junction in command prompt

mklink /J D:\Projects\1999 E:\Projects\1999

The solution with DFS would look like this:

Create file shares

\\ServerA\ProjectsRecent$ at D:\Projects
\\ServerA\ProjectsArchive$ at E:\Projects

I'm hiding these shares with $ as you don't want users to access them directly.

Create a namespace

\\yourdomain.local\projects

Within the namespace, create folders

\\yourdomain.local\projects\2021\ with folder target \\ServerA\ProjectsRecent$\2021
\\yourdomain.local\projects\1999\ with folder target \\ServerA\ProjectsArchive$\1999
Benjamin Hastings
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