unionfs equivalent on Server 2008 R2

Question

Probably a fairly straight forward question, but;

At the moment I have 2 different shares on 2 different machines (one server 2008, the other W7) which are basically a "mirror" of each other that gets periodically synced.

What I would like to be able to do is merge the two contents of these folders so that they appear to be coming from the one location. Read-Write is important to an extent, though realistically it would probably only occur on one location.

Basically, I am looking to emulate unionfs in a Windows environment on my current network. Does anyone know of a solution or software that'll do this?

Cheers

Answer 1

There seems to be a project for this on google code: http://code.google.com/p/winunionfs/ but it also doesn't offer a compiled binary download (not sure if it ever did) implying it is probably not production-quality. But if you're at home or something you could certainly give it a whirl

There is something like this for Windows 7 - depends on what client(s) are accessing said shares, but since you mention windows 7 in your post, this might apply: https://superuser.com/questions/66857/unionfs-alike-on-windows-virtually-merge-folders

Someone else points out that you can also use symbolic links to emulate this - e.g. if your shares are foo and bar, with directories A B C on foo an X Y Z on bar, symbolic link the x y z directories underneath foo (and the reverse on bar so people should see (in theory) all 6 directories underneath both shares. https://superuser.com/questions/185619/unionfs-like-filesystem-for-windows

Haven't tried any of these, though, just offering pointers.

-Mary

Answer 2

its called dfsr. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753479(WS.10).aspx

Answer 3

There isn't a unionfs but you have an number of options:

• Create a junction on diskA\folderB which maps to DiskB\FolderB
• Mount DiskB into a mount point on DiskA (diskb needs to be a dynamic disk)

• Use dfs and create a shares like

  • \\domain\share\folderA
  • \\domain\share\folderB
  • \\domain\share\folderC
  • \\domain\share\folderD
  • \\domain\share\folderE
  • \\domain\share\folderF

where you can locate folders a,b,c,d,e,f on whichever of the two disks you want, and even move them if a disk fills up.

None of these opciones makes complete use of both disks.

• As a final option you can use windows to create a raid stripe set out of the two disks... it joins the two disks onto a single unit, but with a doubling of the risk of loosing data.

Ian