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I have recently added a Windows Home Server (WHS) to my network. One of the PC's on my network has directories called Photos, Music, Video etc. This PC is backed up to the WHS.

Now my question is: Can I somehow mark those backed up directories as shared directories and make them available as network shares to other PC's on the network? Or do I have to copy or move the media folders to the WHS?

4 Answers 4

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You have to copy the data to the shared folders if you want to access them from other computers in your house. One of the benefits of this is you can VPN to your home server and access or even stream anything from those folders should you choose.

I sync my music and photos etc using synctoy

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The backups are not really just browseable copies of your PC, as such, you cannot back up a server and then share the backed up data.

You will have to copy the data you want shared into shares on the WHS and use other methods of synching that data up such as offline files, SyncToy, Windows Live Mesh, etc.

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You will need to move or copy the content to a share on the Home Server. The backups are not designed for general access.

However, if your worried about losing the data if it is on the Home Server (as opposed to just being a backup of the desktop), then you should make sure your Home Server has 2 or more hard drives and turn on duplication on the particular shares. This will ensure that two physically separate (i.e. on different HDDs) copies of the data is maintained.

As an aside, this is what I do for sharing my media around the house. That way it is only stored in 1 locations (the WHS) which means I do not need to worry about maintaining sync, but I still have multiple copies of the data as a 'backup'.

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You can use Windows Live Sync to mirror the folders to the WHS machine. You will get bogus "file conflict" messages due to the .fslock file that WLS uses, but you can just ignore those.

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