Page 949 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

On the other hand, it’s OK to change the sharing settings of a

subfolder. For example, if you’ve shared a folder called America,
you can make the Minnesota folder inside it off-limits by making it
private. To do this, right-click the inner folder, choose Properties,
click Sharing, click Advanced Sharing, and use the dialog box

shown in Figure 19-4.

Be careful with nested folders. Suppose, for example, you share

your Documents folder, and you permit other people to change the
files inside it. Now suppose you share a folder inside Documents—
called Spreadsheets, for example—but you turn off the ability for

other people to change its files.

You wind up with a strange situation. Both folders—Documents
and Spreadsheets—show up in other people’s Network windows. If

they double-click the Spreadsheets folder directly, they won’t be
able to change anything inside it. But if they double-click the
Documents folder and then open the Spreadsheets folder inside it,

they can modify the files.

Hiding Folders

If a certain folder on your hard drive is really private, you can hide the

folder so other people on the network can’t even see it. The secret is to type
a $ symbol at the end of the share name.

For example, if you name a certain folder My Novel, anyone else on the

network can see it (even if they can’t read the contents). But if you name
the folder My Novel$, it won’t show up in anybody’s Network window.
They won’t even know it exists.