Share Files Between All of Your Computers

You will learn how to share folders and file on your Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers on your home network.

Share Files Between All of Your Computers Hi, it’s Chris Masiello with VitaminCM. Today, I'm going to cover sharing files between computers, whether it’s Windows, Macintosh or Linux. I'm going to start off on this Windows computer, so I want to share a folder that has a couple of pictures in it. I’ll just click on the Windows Explorer button. When that opens up, I’ll browse down to the file—the folder I want to share and it’s called ‘Chris’ pictures’. It’s just a folder that has a bunch of pictures I took in it that I want to share with other computers on my network. So I’ll right-click on that folder, see ‘properties’, and on the properties menu, there is a tab called sharing. Go over here and there’s a button. It just says ‘share’. If I click on that, it’s shared and click the share button, and that’s it. Now, if I wanted to do some advanced things like control who can do what to it, I could go here. I could add users. I could give permissions to different users so I could say this person can view files and another person can delete or add files. I'm just going to leave it pretty basic for now. Next, we’re going to cover how to share files or folders on the Macintosh. So in my Macintosh desktop right now, I want to open up the ‘system preferences’ panel. Under ‘system preferences’, under the ‘internet and wireless’ heading, there’s a folder or an icon called ‘sharing’, so click that, and you could control what things you want to share and there are all different things that you can share here, so files, printer sharing, so another—if I have a printer plugged in to this computer, another printer could plug in and use it, share the scanner. So you just check the boxes that you want and close the window and you’re done. Next up, we’re going to set up sharing in Linux. I'm using a Mint Linux distribution here. Lots of people use Ubuntu or several other distributions. They all work pretty similarly to set up sharing. I'm going to open up the file manager. I'm going to open up—the one I'm using is dolphin here, which is pretty commonly used. I want to share this documents folder with some other computers on my drive. So if I right click on it, I go to properties, you’ll see the ‘properties’ menu here; there are some tabs. I’ll go to ‘share’, ‘configure file sharing’. I need to put my machine password here and I want to say ‘remember’, and then I’ll click ‘OK’. Now that I have file sharing set up on my three computers on my network, I’ll show you how you can go find files and connect to those computers. I go to ‘network’ here in Windows, see all the computers on my network, so here’s my Mac. Here’s another Windows computer that I have shared, and here’s my Linux computer, so it’s pretty simply. I can just click on one of the ones that I want to connect to and that’s it. Now, if I want to make things a little more convenient, I’ll right click and select ‘map network drive’ and I’ll give it a letter name, so I’ll give it “M” because this is going to be my Mac, browse through the folder that I want to map to and I’ll map to my iTunes music folder. And make sure you select this ‘reconnect at log on’ so next time I log on, it will show up. And I’ll say ‘finish’. So now, if you notice, my M drive here is the iTunes music folder on my Macintosh. So now, anytime I want to play music on this computer, I can just browse the files that are on my Macintosh computer and play them just as if they were sitting on my C drive. Now, I'm going to show you how to connect to a shared computer from a Macintosh. So open up the finder and click on ‘my computer’ up here, then I’ll click on the network icon and you can see the shared computers on my network. So if I click on this Windows PC, you’ll see the shared folders there. If I click on this laptop, you’ll see the shared folders there, and I could click on the Linux machine to see the shared folders there. Now, if I wanted to keep this permanently mapped so I can always get to it from finder, I can just click on whichever folder I want, so ‘my documents’, then I’ll go to ‘file’, add the sidebar, and now, it will be here permanently. So anytime I open up finder, if both machines are running, I can just click on this and browse through those folders just like I was browsing through the folders on my Macintosh. Now, on Linux, if I want to browse to the drives that I’ve shared on my other computers, I just open the file browser, I can click on network and you can use whatever file manager you’d like and you’ll see some of the different machines I have shared on the network. So if I select my Mac, just double-click it, it wants me to connect as a user, so I’ll put my username. And now, if I click ‘remember forever’, I’ll be able to connect back to this computer all the time and it will just remember that password. So now that I’m connected, I can see all the folders and files on my computer. So if I go into ‘users’, ‘self’, I can go on to different folders and see different things. And if I ever want to unmount this, I’ll just click the red arrow here and it will unmount it and I could always go back to the network and map this or one of my other computers. If I wanted to find one of the Windows computers on my network, I could just click this, go to the workgroup and then look at the computers that are located in there.