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Add NAS shares to index

Anonymous
2010-01-02T05:16:46+00:00

Hi there,

I have a QNAP NAS with a number of network shares I'd like to add to the index. Under Control Panel > Indexing Options, the NAS and any mapped drives are not listed, however an answer here indicates this may be due to an access right issue on the folder. Unfortunately the solution of adding SYSTEM to the folder permissions doesn't work as the permissions on the NAS are controlled by the NAS itself (eg., adding MYNAS\Username would work, but W7LAPTOP\SYSTEM does not).

Is there a way around this? I have seen some symbolic link hacks, but from what I've read, it isn't bulletproof (ie., some actions such as printing don't follow the link properly and result in a file not found). I also do NOT want to make the shares available offline as I do not have the space on my hard drive to cache that much data.

It seems ridiculous that adding network shares requires all this hoop jumping - why aren't network locations available by default in the indexing options?

Thanks for your help.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage

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Anonymous
2010-01-03T04:13:58+00:00

Hi Shehaal,

Thank you for visiting Microsoft Answers!

To index a network folder or drive, you must right-click on it first and select "Always Available offline".

Then it can be indexed, and added to libraries as well.

To add a non-indexed UNC as a library to Windows 7:

  1. Create a folder on your hard drive for shares. i.e. c:\share
  2. Create another folder in the above share. i.e. c:\share\music
  3. Link the Library to this folder.
  4. Delete the folder.
  5. Use the mklink in an elevated command prompt to make a symbolic link. Name the link the same as the folder you created above.

i.e - mklink /d c:\share\music \server\music

  1. Done. Now you have non-indexed UNC path as a library.

Refer these thread links for additional information:

1. http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7files/thread/bb02e087-70fe-4e34-8ff5-bff643c098cb

2. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/efb5b9dd-4281-4a17-947d-d55207bd6015

Regards,

Afzal-Microsoft Support.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-11-23T12:17:47+00:00

    Old answer - but I still found it...

    A worthless solution in my opinion.  This will copy all the files from the NAS drive to the target PC, so no point in storing files on the NAS!

    My NAS, and I guess many others, holds more GB of data than any of my PC's, so this won't even work.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-11-13T03:37:53+00:00

    Hi there,

    I have a QNAP NAS with a number of network shares I'd like to add to the index. Under Control Panel > Indexing Options, the NAS and any mapped drives are not listed, however an answer here indicates this may be due to an access right issue on the folder. Unfortunately the solution of adding SYSTEM to the folder permissions doesn't work as the permissions on the NAS are controlled by the NAS itself (eg., adding MYNAS\Username would work, but W7LAPTOP\SYSTEM does not).

    Is there a way around this? I have seen some symbolic link hacks, but from what I've read, it isn't bulletproof (ie., some actions such as printing don't follow the link properly and result in a file not found). I also do NOT want to make the shares available offline as I do not have the space on my hard drive to cache that much data.

    It seems ridiculous that adding network shares requires all this hoop jumping - why aren't network locations available by default in the indexing options?

    Thanks for your help.

    Set up your NAS as an iSCSI Device and then use the iSCSI initiator on your Windows 7 computer to see it.  Then the NAS will show up as a standard disk drive.   If you have other computers on the network you can map the iSCSI drive to each computer and read/write to it.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-11-12T16:09:08+00:00

    Hi Microsoft

    Always available is not really a solution for the users problem !

    So if the user has a Laptop with a 512MB SDD, and his NAS / share has 3GB of files in it.... issue, right!

    The whole purpose of the user having a NAS is absolute, because now sync'ed copies of these files lives on his laptop.

    I also do not understand why there is not  another solution for this.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-05-13T03:09:52+00:00

    no you can't. lol. iSCSI shares can't be exported and shared like NFS or CIFS shares.

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