3: Managing and Maintaining Access to Resources

Table of Contents

1. Working with Shared Folders
2. Offline Files
3. Troubleshooting Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Connections
4. Windows Server 2003 File Systems
   1. Converting from FAT or FAT32 to NTFS
   2. NTFS Disk Quotas
   3. NTFS Data Compression
   4. NTFS Data Encryption
   5. Encrypting a File or Folder
   6. Copying and Moving Encrypted Files
   7. Shadow Copies of Shared Folders
   8. Setting Up Shadow Copies
   9. Accessing Shadow Copies
5. Configuring File System Permissions

Windows Server 2003 File Systems

As you may recall, Windows Server 2003 supports three file systems for disk storage access: the File Allocation Table 16-bit (FAT or FAT16), the FileAllocation Table 32-bit (FAT32) and the native NTFS file system. FAT has been around since the MS-DOS command line operating and FAT32 was introduced in Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2) as a 32-bit version supporting larger hard disks and speeding up disk access.

Neither FAT nor FAT32 supports file-system permissions, and they are not nearly as robust for storing and securing both programs and data as the NTFS file system.

NTFS is therefore the preferred file system for all Windows Server 2003 disk partitions and volumes whether they reside on basic or dynamic disks.

Windows Server 2003 supports both FAT and FAT32 with the following restrictions:

• Pre-existing FAT32 partitions up to 2TB are supported in Windows Server 2003.

• Windows Server 2003 allows you to format new FAT32 volumes of only 32GB or smaller.

• FAT volumes are limited to a maximum size of 4GB and can support a maximum file size of 2GB.

• FAT32 volumes can support a maximum file size of 4GB.

You can install Windows Server 2003 onto FAT, FAT32, or NTFS partitions or volumes, but remember that you have no local security unless you place the operating system on an NTFS partition.

Windows Server 2003 uses NTFS version 5 (NTFS5) as its native file system, as do Windows XP and Windows 2000. NTFS5 features include granular file and folder permissions, disk quotas, encryption using the Encrypting File System (EFS) and data compression.

When you install Windows Server 2003 onto an NTFS partition (or volume), the setup process applies default security settings to the system files and folders located on the boot partition (or volume): the %systemdrive%\Windows and %systemdrive%\Program Files folders.

When you install Windows Server 2003, any pre-existing NTFS volumes are automatically upgraded to NTFS5. Computers running Windows NT 4.0 with SP4, SP5, or SP6 installed can read and write to NTFS5 volumes.

Next: Converting from FAT or FAT32 to NTFS