ActiveTransfer enables you to create a virtual file system (VFS). A virtual file system provides an abstract, virtual view of resources in your physical file system or on a remote system such as another FTP server. This capability enables users and client applications to access a variety of file systems in a uniform way. Although the information in a virtual folder might be physically stored across one or more local or remote file systems in your enterprise, it appears as a cohesive data collection in the VFS.

You create a virtual file system by creating one or more virtual folders, which you typically arrange in a file system hierarchy. For example, you can create a group of virtual folders to categorize your organization’s sales for various years. At the top level of folders, you can create a group of separate virtual folders, each representing one year of sales. Inside each yearly virtual folder, you can create 12 virtual folders to represent the monthly sales data for that year.

After you create a virtual folder, you then assign users to the folder and specify each user’s access privileges for that folder. When the users log in to ActiveTransfer, they see the folders they can access and the resources within those folders. In this way, you can store different types of data (for example, sales data and customer profile information) on the same physical file system, yet control access to that data according to individual need.

A VFS also bridges the differences between file systems on various operating systems so that users and applications can access files without having to know what type of file system they are accessing.

In ActiveTransfer, you can configure virtual folders to exchange files with an SMB server. The SMB protocol allows ActiveTransfer to read, create, and update files on a network file share or a remote server that supports SMB, with the option to specify the user name and password for access. ActiveTransfer supports SMB 1.0, SMB 2.0, and SMB 3.0 versions. By default, Microsoft Windows systems support the native SMB protocol. However, UNIX systems must have interoperability utilities like Samba. SMB also allows for cross-platform file access. For example, ActiveTransfer running on Microsoft Windows system can access files on a Linux system.

Typically, file operations are faster when you connect to a network file share using SMB protocol (SMB://host/Folder/) than when directly using a network file path (for example, FILE:////host/SharedFolder/). This is especially true when the operations are carried out on a large number of files.