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Local vs. Hosted Storage

Video Transcript

Next, we're going to look at local versus hosted storage. So local storage is when you store fires on your local machine. Maybe on an internal hard drive and hosted storage is when you store your files somewhere else on the network. So we're gonna have a look at the various ways of doing both. It's a local storage. If you store your files locally, this means you're either storing them in the local hard drive or you may be you have plugged in a USB drive and you're storing them there.

If you do store files locally, it is only accessible to someone who is physically logged into the device. It's also hard to share the fire with other users because you can either maybe copy it to removable media like a USB flash drive. Or as you will see later on in this module, you could share the folder it is in, and they could then access it through the network. It is therefore fairly secure.

Unless someone else can actually log onto your computer or gained and gain physical access to it, it is hard for them to gain access to your files. On the other hand, it is up to you to make sure all your files are backed up. If you haven't not doing regular backups and say your hard drive crashes, you might lose all of your files. Hosted storage is when we put the files somewhere else on the network. Now this could be within our local area network. It could be a file server that's been set up by a network administrator, or it could be a server located somewhere on the Internet advantages of this.

Once you put your file onto some server on the network, it's easy to share the file. You could tell other users how they can get access to that file, and typically, the file servers are regularly backed up by your network. Administrators. Sell the responsibility for keeping backups is no longer yours.

Well, what if you don't have a network administrator or file servers on your network, such as on your home network? While anyone can sign up with a cloud provider and in that case, they can store their files in the cloud, as they say, Well, I really means Is this your storing it on a server that is maintained by the cloud provider that you have signed up with, which could be in these days of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, so on. So there are many cloud providers that offer storage.

For example, Microsoft one Dr Google, Dr Amazon, Dr Dropbox, or just some common ones on They often have a free tier where you get a certain amount of limited storage online for free. And then, if you want to store more data than think this capacity that they give you for free, then you have to pay. So, for example, Microsoft one Dr offers five gigabytes of free storage online.

Google Drive offers 15 gigabytes of free storage online, and now backing up and keeping your data secure has become the responsibility off the cloud provider. So they're gonna have pretty extensive backup capabilities. And very often they give you lots of additional features, such as because they are doing regular backups. They can allow you to, for example, roll back a particular file to a particular date and time.

So, like if I created a file a month ago and I've been editing it every day and making changes to it with a cloud provider, they might have give me the ability to grow it back two weeks to what the file was like two weeks ago or two days ago or three weeks ago. So that's a very useful benefit that they sometimes give you. And you can download your files from anywhere where you have an Internet connection, and typically you can download it onto any device with any operating system, and you can easily collaborate with other users by sharing the uploaded file with them.

So with most of these cloud based storage service is, I can upload something to the cloud, and then I can choose to share it with some other users. So let's have a look at using Google Drive. First of all, I'm just gonna go ahead and upload a file, and you can see there that it's now uploading. So this is getting stored somewhere on Google's servers some way and one of their data centers, and you'll see that the share command if I want to share it and the download command, if I want to download it again now, I'm gonna upload a text document and show you some other benefits of cloud storage.

So once it's upload it, I can click on it and just get a preview of what's in the documents so I could read it. But even better, I can right click it and I can open it up using an online word processor such as Google Docks. Now, once it opens up in Google Dogs, that's rather like opening it up locally in Microsoft Word. I can go in and edit the file, and then once I've done that, I could download the file, or I could share it with other uses now within your local network. If you don't have a file server and you don't have network administrators, you can still share your files with other users through the network.

So this is called file sharing with in your local area network. But first, a little bit of background because the way you do it depends on what type of network configuration you have. Computers that are networked together can belong to a work group or a home group or a domain. So we're gonna focus on work groups and home groups because that's typically what you see in a SoHo network small office Home Office network. In large corporate networks, they set up Windows domains and one of the things that Window's domains give you it centralized user account management, centralized control and easy ways of sharing files with other users.

But the focus of this course is on what groups or home groups, so we'll continue looking at those What groups are supported by every version of Windows Home groups are only supported by wind of seven and later operating systems. So here's what happens on a work group. And also here are some of the problems, So in a work group, you create accounts for user's on particular computers. So the computer on the right hand side has a user account for Liz, and she logs on to that using her account.

The computer on the Left has a user account for user called Fred, and he loves onto his machine. Using that account. Then Fred decides to share a file. Liz tries to connect to it. Associate sends a connection request. But what happens is Fred's computer checks in its local list of user accounts, and it doesn't find lizards account there, So the initial reaction is access denied, says I don't know who you are. I have no information about you in my user account database and therefore I'm denying the connection.

So one way of getting around that would be this. As an administrator, I could log on to Fred's computer, and I could create an account for Liz there, same username, same password that I could figure for her on her computer, and in that case, she could then connect to Fred's machine. It would then check its accounts database, and it would find an account called Lays with the same password so it would allow the connection. Um, but as we'll see in a minute, this solution doesn't work very well once you start to get a larger networks. But there is another possible solution. And that is this.

That when Liz is denied access, she tries to connect again. But by providing Fred's credentials all right, so she provides friends, user name and password. With a problem with that is, she has to know friends credentials. And if we extrapolate that into a larger network, would we really want all our users to know every other users user name and password so they can connected their computers and share files with them generally, no It's a very bad idea for anyone but the user to know what the users log on name and passwords are, so that's not a great solution, either. So in a workgroup, therefore, each computer maintains its own separate list of user accounts. In order to log onto a computer, you must have an account already created for you on that machine.

Then, in order to access another computer across the network, you must also have an account on the pocket computer. As I said earlier that this could work, but it quickly becomes unmanageable if you have five users and you want them to be able to access anything on any of 15 computers, you could duplicate those five accounts on the five computers, and you'd end up creating 25 accounts. But imagine if your network grows just a little bit. You now have 10 users and 10 computers. This means you have to create 10 user accounts on each one of those 10 computers, and you end up creating 100 accounts.

And it's even worse than it seems, because remember, Windows by default requires users to change their past with every 42 days, so every 42 days, you would have to walk round all 100 old 10 computers, an update all 10 accounts on each of the 10 computers, so you would be regularly managing and updating 100 different accounts. It's obviously this does not scale well to any large neck work. So in Windows seven, Microsoft introduced the idea off home groups, which was their solution to this problem. In a whole group. There would be no need to duplicate user accounts on each computer.

And that's because when a home group is set up, the computers are all configured to trust each other. This allows you to share parts within the home group without having to have accounts for every user on every computer. Hung groups are, though, meant full so networks, so they're not really designed for corporate networks. And, in fact, the business additions off Windows that is Windows Professional or Windows Enterprise don't even support the creation of home groups in a corporate network.

They use windows domains in order to centrally manage everything and control things like power sharing. We've been talking about file sharing and using the term file sharing in reality, though the way it works is this. You don't share individual files. What you actually share is the folder that contains those files. So in Windows you can set up shared folders, and when you set up a shared folder, you can set up permissions. And that specifies which users or groups can access the folder.

And what permission Ahab, for example, Can they only agreed documents in the folder or can actually modify the documents in that folder? Once a shared folder is set up, the way you connect to it across the network is using U. N C syntax U. N. C. Stands for universal naming convention, and there's a couple of ways of doing it. If you just type backslash, backslash and then the name of another computer that will connect to the computer and it will show you in a window what shared folders or shared printers exist on that computer, you can then double click one of them. Alternatively, if you already know the name of the folder, you can use what you see on the bottom off the slide backslash, backslash name of the computer and then backsplash, and the name of the folder that you want to connect to.

So let's have a look at all of this being done here. I have two computers, one running Windows 10 and the other running with just seven on the Windows 10 computer. I'm going to create a folder, and I'm gonna call it budget. And then I'm gonna open the folder and create a file in here, and we're going to call that file budget forecast and then just open that up and type a few words in there.

Okay, so this point I've created a folder, and I've created a file in it, but I have not shared the folder. So if we go over to the window seven machine and we're not going to use the U. N C path to connect to the Windows 10 machine, so I'm going to type backslash backslash, and then the name of the Windows 10 computer and a window pops up, and it shows me that there's nothing being shared. Now let's go back to the Windows 10 machine, and I'm going to share the folder.

So I'm gonna go into its properties, go to the sharing tab, click on advanced sharing, check the box to share the folder and down there the bottom. You see a button marked permissions. And this is where I can control which users or groups can access the folder and what they can do with it. Now that I have shared the folder, let's go back to the window seven machine and again we'll type in the U. N. C. Part backslash backslash name of the Windows 10 computer. And now you'll see it shows me Yes, there is a shared folder on Aiken. Double click it double click the document in there and they just opened up the document for me.

Alternatively, fell on a copy of my local machine. I can simply drag it with the right mouse button, drop it on the desktop and then choose copy here. I now have a local copy of that file. Another way of connecting to shared folders is to map a network drive. This is essentially the same thing, is what we just did, except that when you connect to the shared folder you allocated a drive letter, and from that point onwards, it'll appear as if it was a local drive on your machine. Well, someone look at doing that. So again, at the Window seven machine.

I'm going to right click on computer and then choose map Network Drive. Choose an available Dr Letter, any drive letter that's not already being used and then I'm gonna put in the U. N C path. Backslash backslash name of the Windows 10 computer and then back slash the name of the shed. Fold up. Okay, so now you'll see if I click on computer, it says you have a Dr Q. And there it is. And actually it's not really a drive. It's is a connection to the shared folder on the Windows 10 machine.

You'll see. It tells me that up there in the address bar and you see the document that I've bean looking at in there. Similarly, if I open up a command prompt in a command property can switch to a particular drive by typing in its drive letter and then a colon. So I typed que colon, and it shows me the contents of the Q drive and what I type D i R. It shows me that there's a file in there last the file I've been looking at so again, at the command prompt, it appears as if it was a local drive was. In fact, what I'm doing is connecting to that shared folder on the Windows 10 machine.

Intermediate
Intermediate
Course link:
CompTIA IT Fundamentals
This CompTIA IT Fundamentals course is aimed at people considering a career change to IT. The course will prepare you to take the CompTIA IT Fundamentals certification exam. If you are new to IT this course is prerequisite knowledge that allows you to tackle the more advanced A+ and Network+ CompTIA certifications that many IT professionals hold.
Instructed by
Instructor
Ali Wasti