Linking Folders (mklink)–(Or adding adding a remote folder within another folder ;o) )

Sounds easy right? Just copy or move it! Buts that's not what I wanted.

I had a server where it had some usb attached storage that I wanted to be available within an existing shared folder… ok let me try and make it clearer..

I had a share on a server called “pictures”, which was a share of a local folder d:\pictures, i could access this share with a unc address

\\servername\pictures

This would show me the content of d:\pictures.

Now I had a lot of archive pictures on a usb drive and ideally I would of like them to be all accessible via the share (i did not really want to have to created another share).

So how do I do this in windows. Well from Vista / Windows 2008 server there is a command called mklink. This command allows you to add a reference to another folder within a folder.

So we have d:\pictures and in there we have a range of folders and files. Now out usb drive is attached and using the drive letter z:\. So I want to allow the contents of z:\ to be visible within d:\pictures. So I use the following command form the command prompt within the d:\pictures folder.

mklink /D /J externalStorage1 Z:\

Now if I dir in the d:\pictures folder, I will see a new folder called externalStorage1 and if I change directory to externalStorage1 I can see the contents of the z:\ drive. In addition if I browse the share remotely

\\servername\pictures

you will find that you can see and access externalstorage1.

excellent.

Note: You must use /J to create what they call a directory junction (a hard link to a folder), there are hard and soft links and I will leave you to work out the differences. However I will say that if you don’t use /J and you will find that the link will not work when viewing across the network share.

Linking Folders (mklink)–(Or adding adding a remote folder within another folder ;o) )