Every once in a while Microsoft does something that causes admins all over to sigh FINALLY, Access Based Enumeration (ABE) is one such feature. New to Windows Server 2003 is the ability to install a small add-on that delivers what Novell and *Nix admins have had forever; the ability to hide files or folders that the user has no rights to access. ...

The Shadow Copy Service is one of the new features in Windows Server 2003 sure to ease the life of any sysadmin. Shadow Copies reduce the chance of data loss by creating shadow copies of files and/or folders that are stored on network shares at specified intervals. By enabling shadow copies you can keep a set of previous versions of a file/folder ...

One very common issue is mapped drives to network shares automatically disconnecting after a set period of time. The drive will reconnect when you click on it in My Computer, but some applications will error out when it tries to access the disconnected network drive. This is an easy problem to resolve and we can do it at the command line or in ...

The File Server Resource Manager includes an option to generate reports on file server storage. These reports can include information on disk usage and quotas, file screening and more... Reports can be run at anytime or scheduled to run at specific times. You can run reports to locate duplicate files, understand storage activities, and analyze how ...

Users like to save everything. Unfortunatley disk space is not unlimited and when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING! JPEGs, MP3s, AVIs and other ''crap'' fills up file servers, is often forgotten about and in some cases against the IT policy in place. R2 includes a feature in the File Server Resource Manager to control and manage the types of ...

Windows Server 2003 R2 includes a File Server Resource Manager MMC snap-in that offers a set of tools for the administration of file servers. The File Server Resource Manager MMC can be used to enforce quotas on folders and volumes, perform real-time file screening, and create storage reports. Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 both support ...

One of the bigger upgrades available in R2 is the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM). With FSRM you can manage quotas, file screening, file system reporting and DFS for your network from one MMC console. FSRM provides complete control over file servers as well as reporting of any issues with quotas, file screening, DFS and more! FSRM is pretty ...

You can use File Server Management to perform many tasks, such as formatting volumes, creating shares, defragmenting volumes, creating and managing shares, setting quota limits, creating storage utilization reports, replicating data to and from the file server, managing Storage Area Networks (SANs), and sharing files with UNIX and Macintosh ...

The other day I wrote about using the File Server Migration Toolkit. It is a very handy little tool, however it has its quirks. In the previous article I mentioned that the default target sharename is sharename_sourcename and the target location is [drive letter]:\sourcename. By selecting the source folder these options can be edited on the right ...

As with all servers, hardware gets old, outdated and needs to be replaced every few years. File server migration can be a chore; moving all the data is simple enough but what about the permissions and sharing status? Well this is where the File Server Migration Toolkit (FSMT) saves the day! Administrators can use the FSMT to migrate all the data, ...

There are two forms of file system permissions, share and NTFS. Windows 2000/XP sets the share permissions to Everyone - Full Control. Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2003 changed that to Everyone - Read Only. That is ok, as you can lock down access rights with NTFS Permissions, however it is a best practice to remove the Everyone group, and add the ...

Shadow Copies reduce the chance of data loss by creating shadow copies of files and/or folders that are stored on network shares at specified intervals. By enabling shadow copies you can keep a set of previous versions of a file/folder that an end user can access through Windows Explorer. End users can transparently recover deleted files, ...