Hello, I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do you share a folder? I tried Googling but I think I just fail at that. Basically, what I want to do is, say in Person 1's folder, there is a folder called "My Games". I want to share that folder so that it's in Person 2's folder. Say also whenever I put new things in it, it will automatically update in Person 2's folder. Sorry again if I'm not clear enough in what I'm asking. Please and thank you.

I use Windows 7 if it helps.

There are lots of ways of doing so, depending on the specifics of your situation.
If you're both on a network together, it should be fairly trivial. I'm running Windows XP, and I was able to share a folder with my brother (running Linux on his computer) just by selecting "Share this folder on the network" under the Sharing tab of the folder properties.

There's also HFS, which is an extremely simple to use tool that allows you to setup folders to be browseable and downloadable by others through their browsers.

Windows 7 has a feature called homegroup if it is a network connection.

If you're running off an internet connection, there a few different tools you can use. Google just launched their cloud service Drive. Microsoft also has a cloud service SkyDrive.

Also, there are other options like Mediafire.

Thanks for the quick replies, but I meant to say that I wanted to share a folder between two accounts within the laptop. I don't want to be sharing it online or anything. I simply want to put files in the folder, and when I do, it'll automatically when the second person logs in and checks their folder.

Right click the folder you want to share > properties > sharing tab.

C:\Users\Public

I think you can find some preshared folders here.

Well this should automatically be the case since both accounts are using the same hard drive and thus the same files. Common example is the Windows folder.
However there are special folders created by Windows that are duplicated for every account and those are kept in separate copies that can contain different content. Most notably the "My Documents" folder and it's derivates (My Pictures, My Movies, etc.).


So the simplest solution would be to keep the data in any regular folder (e.g. none of the Windows-provided shortcut folders). Or you could create a dedicated folder (e.g. C:\Shares) and put everything there. Note that non-admin accounts may need to get permissions to access/read/write (to) the folder first. This is done in the security tab:




But if you want to keep your files in My Documents folder you'd have to do 2 things:
a) Give the other account access to this folder also using the security tab of the folder properties and then
b) the other accounts needs a way of navigating there since when he clicks on "My Documents" he'll always end up in his own copy. This is easiest achieved by placing a shortcut to your My Documents on his Desktop.

The physical location (needed to create said shortcut) of the folder is by default:
C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\My Documents (Windows XP)
C:\Users\[Username]\My Documents (Windows Vista & 7)

I see, is there a way to possibly have the folder in two paths? Like, C:\Users\Person 1\Folder, and C:\Users\Person 2\Folder, so they both contain the same folder with the same content but being able to access it from different paths, or am I forced to use one of the other ways you guys mentioned?

I guess you could use synchronization to force both folders to always have the same content but I wouldn't know how to set it up, especially when the folders are across different users. I suspect problems and odd behavior since where I live we have a server-client synchronization which is just ridiculously broken. Often times I delete something just to have it restored by synchronization the next day over and over again.

And even if you get it to work properly you'd still waste space as everything will be stored twice on the hard drive.
Really, the most simple and elegant solution is to have a shortcut for user 2 to link to user 1's folder.

Is there a specific reason you don't want to use a shortcut?

You can't really have the same file in different directories; you'd have to duplicate the file. You could get around this by making the "Folder" folder a shortcut to a single directory, so it would look like the two users are navigating to different areas, but they end up in the same spot.

Use the mklink command in Command Prompt and try the junction type of link. You may or may not need to run Command Prompt as administrator. For removing the link I haven't looked up if there is another way, but the rmdir command seems to be a safe way to remove the link when you want to do so, since it is a command that won't remove a folder that contains files (the link counts as an empty folder, apparently).

Oh jeez. If you know what's good for you, stay away from symbolic/hard links like the plague. Those can easily mess with your head.

Unless you really like C pointers or something. Then feel free to go nuts.

I don't see what's so hard about symlinking folders. In practice it's not really that different from a windows shortcut - in fact Microsoft deliberately went with their shortcuts instead of doing symlinks.

Now, if you're going to have nested folders and symlinks pointing every which way, then yes, that's nasty. But if you use them sensibly, eg <5 folders symlinked to some other folder, and no crazy circular references, what's the problem?

No, not really, I just wanted to be neat and organized in the way I requested, but I guess I'll be going with either the public folders or shortcuts.

Thanks for the help guys, this can be closed.