What Dfs Does

Dfs provides the ability to logically group shared folders on different servers and to transparently link shared folders into a single, hierarchical namespace.

Historically, with universal naming convention (UNC) names, a user or application would specify the physical server and shared folder to gain access to file information — for example, to \\Server\Shared_folder\Path\File_name. Even though a UNC can be used directly, if it is an often-used UNC, it is usually mapped to a drive letter, where the drive letter denotes \\Servers\Shared_folder. The user then navigates beyond the redirected drive mapping to the data to which he or she wants to gain access. An example might be the following, where X is the drive letter:

copy X:\path\more_path\...\file_name

As networks continue to grow in size and as organizations begin to use existing storage, both internally and externally, for purposes such as intranets, mapping a single drive letter to individual shares becomes inefficient. And, despite their ability to directly reference UNC naming, users can become overwhelmed by the increasing number of places to which they must gain access to retrieve data.

Dfs solves these problems by linking file servers and shared folders to a simpler, more meaningful namespace. This new namespace permits shared folders to be related to each other within a single hierarchy. Because Dfs maps the physical storage to a logical representation, the net benefit is that the physical location of data becomes transparent to users and applications.

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