Linking 'My Documents' to a networked drive?

NoxTek

NoxTek

The Geek Redneck
Joined
May 27, 2002
Messages
9,300
Long story short, I want to link 'My Documents' to a directory on a drive in our NAS box, Windows 7 tells me quite sternly NO - that I can't do this unless the linked destination is indexed. How can I accomplish this, fine [H] brethren?

The NAS box is running FreeNAS, the filesystems on the NAS drives are standard UFS, and the drives are mounted and shared using FreeNAS' built in CIFS/SMB server.

Any ideas?
 
googles can help you.

browse to the nas, right click on teh folder you want to map too, and select make available offline

then right click on my documents and move to the server.
 
DO you have a domain, your can use folder redirection if you do
 
Many pardons if I'm being dense here, but there has to be another answer besides the 'make offline' task, to me that seems stupid as it copies the entire contents of the destination (linked) directory to the directory I want to link from in the first place. The whole reason I'm doing this is to have all our documents folders on a centralized server in the house.

Hrmmm....
 
Make offline caches the contents onto the pc. The actual files will reside on the server. If the network connection goes down users can still access their documents using the cached version on the pc. It's a fail safe measure and definitely a good thing.
 
Mister Natural said:
Make offline caches the contents onto the pc. The actual files will reside on the server. If the network connection goes down users can still access their documents using the cached version on the pc. It's a fail safe measure and definitely a good thing.
Click to expand...

Maybe something I will explore in the future, but right now I'm working with several PCs each having a very small hard drive.

Anyway I figured out the problem and the solution, and I figured out that the bean heads at M$ are dumbasses (in case there was any doubt).

Apparently beginning with Windows 7 and the whole 'Libraries' approach anything you choose to include in your libraries must have a supported search index entry ala a Microsoft OS. So if my NAS were running WHS or another Windows 2000 or higher o/s with MS Search 4.0+ installed there would be no issue. The only 'official' way around this is to use the 'make available offline' widget as mentioned earlier in this thread.

Thankfully someone banged their head against a wall long enough to come up with a sideways solution - with hidden and system files visible go to C:\Users\<username> and find the 'My Documents' directory (not the shortcut mind you, the actual directory) and right click on it. AHA! The old famillar WinNT/2K/XP style 'Location' tab is there, and you can change the location to any damned directory you like, even on a mapped network drive, thereby bypassing Windows 7's insistance that the location be indexed.

You know what's really stupid? If you go into services.msc (the Microsoft console that lets you control what background services run on the PC) and completely disable Windows Search, Windows 7 still makes the 'This location must be indexed' demand when you try to add a networked location to one of your libraries.

*le-sigh*


Thanks for all the tips and helpful advice anyway. :)
 
This can be done. I got everyone working like this at work.
 
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