Distributed File System (Microsoft)

This article is about Microsoft's implementation of DFS. For general discussion of the concept and other implementations, see Distributed file system.

Distributed File System (DFS) is a set of client and server services that allow an organization using Microsoft Windows servers to organize many distributed SMB file shares into a distributed file system. DFS has two components to its service: Location transparency (via the namespace component) and Redundancy (via the file replication component). Together, these components enable data availability in the case of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, the "DFS root".

Microsoft's DFS is referred to interchangeably as 'DFS' and 'Dfs' by Microsoft and is unrelated to the DCE Distributed File System, which held the 'DFS' trademark[1] but was discontinued in 2005.

It is also called "MS-DFS" or "MSDFS" in some contexts, e.g. in the Samba user space project.[2]

  1. ^ "Dfs vs. DFS". Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2014-02-02.
  2. ^ "smb.conf man page, section host msdfs". Retrieved 2018-03-07.