Sharing Made Easy

Windows Home Server comes with a pre-defined set of shared folders:  Photos, Music, Videos, Software and Public to enable families to share and access their favorite stuff from any PC in the house.  And after installing the Windows Home Server Connector software on each PC, a shortcut named "Shared Folders on Server" is added to the desktop of each of your PCs.

After installing my home server, I copied all of my photos and music from my PCs up to my home server.  It was a manual operation (i.e. "drag and drop"), but it gave me time to organize and clean up all of my media files.  Now I can access my photo collection from any PC in the house.  I gave myself "Read/Write" access to all of the shared folders, and everybody else in the house has "Read/Only" access.  I also changed the default location on Windows Media Player so as I rip a new music CD - it gets stored in the "Music" shared folder on my home server. 

Also, as I download new photos from my digital camera, they are now stored in the "Photos" folder on my home server.  I also took the time to peruse through my photo collection, and created a folder called "Favorites" and stored a copy of some of my favorite photos in this folder. I set the default screensaver to "Photos" on my wife's PC and changed the Settings ... to "Use pictures and videos from :"  \\SERVER\Photos\Favorites  So when her PC is not in use, it is shuffling through some of our favorite photos.

I have created a few of my own Shared Folders on my home server.  I have a folder called "Finance" that I use to store important financial documents and data and I created another folder called "Documents" that currently contains a random mish-mash of stuff that that I need to clean-up and organize.  I have Folder Duplication  enabled on my Shared folders so that there are 2 copies of my music, photos and other important stuff automatically stored on separate hard drives.