Symbolic Links on Windows 2003 – Junction Points

As I was working on adding storage space to an my Apache based web server I ran into a small problem.¬† Having some familiarity with UNIX I had always been able to add more storage space or redirect folder locations by creating a symbolic links inside of the htdocs folder.¬† I setup the gcsdblogs.org webserver on a Windows 2003 server based machine which means Рno symbolic links.¬† Well thanks to google I found out that Microsoft does support a very similar feature in their NTFS 5.0 file system, calling symbolic links to folder locations by the name of¬† Junction Points or Mount Points(entire volume).

Using a nifty free program called Junction Link Magic you can easily create almost the equivalent of a symbolic link with an easy to use GUI interface.

In this example I am using a Junction Point to add a new folder called Music to my Apache webserver,   this folder resides on a different disk with 200 free gigs of space.  Since my original Apache configuration was installed on a volume with only 40 gigs of space this is a useful way to add disk space without attempting to resize a partition.