Syncplify Help Center

Applies to: Syncplify.me Server!
Version(s): 4.x - 5.x
Warning:    this articles refers to an older version of our software

Some of our Syncplify.me Server! users prefer to store their users’ home folders (actually VFSs as of version 4.0) on a different machine via shared folders. For example, instead of having your user’s home point to  C:\SFTPData you want to have it point to \\10.100.2.23\SFTPData.

This is a perfectly reasonable and fairly common request. As of version 4.0 (and newer) Syncplify.me Server! provides a variety of methods to accomplish this goal.

The first step is always the same: creating a (Disk or DiskAES256) VFS that points to the network-shared folder, like this:

Once the VFS is created, you can proceed and create a User profile that uses the newly created VFS as its “home”. And this is where you have many options.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: regardless of the user type, because of specific design choices that Microsoft made when designing the Windows operating system, you will always, with no exception, need some type of impersonation to access a network-shared (UNC) path from a system service. See here below.

For example,  if your entire infrastructure runs on Windows (including the machine that shares the folder) and all your systems are ActiveDirectory-aware, then you can specify the user type as “Active Directory” and impersonate the home VFS as “this user”:

There’s also a case where you’re running everything on Windows but you still want to create a “normal” (local to Syncplify.me Server! only) user profile. Even in such case you still can access the home VFS by impersonating a specific Windows or Active Directory user, like this:

Instead, if your storage server does not run on Windows or is not AD-aware ( like a Linux NAS, for example) then your only option is to create the user profile as “normal” (local to Syncplify.me Server! only) and then impersonate as “NetworkShare” user, as shown in the picture here below:

The bottom line is that Syncplify.me Server! is very flexible, and very often provides many ways to accomplish the same goal, each one more suitable to the specific configuration of your infrastructure and network. We suggest to try several options, depending on your specific configuration and choose the one that works best in your environment.