Menu
Home
People
Places
Arts
History
Plants & Animals
Science
Life & Culture
Technology
Reference.org
Distributed File System (Microsoft)
open-in-new
<p>Distributed File System (DFS) is a set of client and server services that allow an organization using <a href="/facts/Microsoft_Windows/bwhAhuSL">Microsoft Windows</a> servers to organize many distributed <a href="/facts/Server_Message_Block/pWM35pl8">SMB</a> file shares into a <a href="/facts/Distributed_file_system/Bz61f7Ce">distributed file system</a>. 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". </p><p>Microsoft's DFS is referred to interchangeably as 'DFS' and 'Dfs' by Microsoft and is unrelated to the <a href="/facts/DCE_Distributed_File_System/TglTDBIh">DCE Distributed File System</a>, which held the 'DFS' trademark but was discontinued in 2005. </p><p>It is also called "MS-DFS" or "MSDFS" in some contexts, e.g. in the <a href="/facts/Samba_(software)/Huyc2pnX">Samba</a> <a href="/facts/User_space/0yIzMY8t">user space</a> project. </p>