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What are directory junctions?
John Savill
January 8, 2000
1 Min Read
A. Directory junctions allow you to join folders together so you can map a directory to any localtarget directory. Imagine you had three folders, c:folder1, c:folder2 andc:documents. Its possible to create a directory junction to c:documentsappears as a subdirectory of the other two folders resulting inc:folder1documents and c:folder2documents.
Originally a utility was supplied which enabledthe creation of these junction points, linkd.exe, however this is now removedfrom the product and will be supplied with the Resource Kit. Directory junctions canalso be created using the Application ProgrammingInterface but you need to write a program.
On first view, directory junctions andthe Distributed File System perform some of the same roles as they both give theappearance of a single directory tree which actually consist of multiple,distributed folders however there are differences:
DFS utilitizes the Active Directory to store its information
Thanks to its Active Directory root Dfs can provide fault tolerance and load balancing, directory junctions cannot provide either of these although in a local context its not so necessary
DFS is more geared to merging network resources into a single namespace where as directory junctions only link local machine resources
DFS can work using multiple file systems but directory junctions rely on NTFS 5.0
DFS requires a client piece, directory junctionsdon’t
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