Setting Up a Shared Folder on Your Network

 Shared folders are a great way of passing information from one home pc to another without having to mess around with USB drives and physically carry files from one place to the next. As the name implies shared folders aren't quite central resources on your network but a shared folder on a specific machine which can be accessed from anyone on your network. Here's a quick step by step.

Rename your PC

Your PC name is how your machine will be identified on the network and what will need to be typed as part of the address for any shared folders, because of this I like to make sure that each machine on the network is named in a way that it's easily identifiable and easy to remember rather than the often nonsense names PCs are given by default. This step isn't vital but it's something I like to do before setting up network shares rather than afterwards to save on renaming issues. Fortunately this is a quick and easy thing to fix, simply hit the Windows key and Pause/Break at the same time to bring up the about page for your pc, it should look roughly like the below (assuming you're on windows 10 and have it set to dark mode).

As you can see there's a handily placed "Rename this PC" button, hit that and give your machine a name that helps you remember which one it is and who it belongs to. 

Now restart your PC to let the change propogate, anecdotally I've found that turning off the pc and turning it back on didn't do the job for me so do actually hit the restart command and do it before heading on to the next steps.

Turn on Network Discovery

 If you're setting up a home network to enable sharing between PCs then it makes sense to turn on the network discovery features to make it easier for networked devices to find each other. These settings can be found a number of ways, what you're looking for is:

Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Network and Sharing Centre > Advanced Sharing Settings

 You can obviously click through the menus above in order to get to what you want but I find it's much easier to simply hit the windows key and start typing "Advanced Sharing Settings". Save and you're done

Creating a Shared Folder

  The actual creation of a shared folder is very simple:

• Create the folder you'd like to share directly on your C:\ drive
  • Open explorer (Win+E) and click on "This PC" on the left, then double click on C:\ 
• Right-click on the folder and select Give Access To>Specific People
  • In the top dropdown select "Everyone" and hit the "Add" button
  • Next to Everyone select the access that you'd like them to have, for my network I want to be able to add/edit/remove items in that folder from anywhere. Then hit Save.
    • You may want to set things up so that each machine can 'publish' to their shared folder and other machines 

Now that you've created your shared folder you should be able to access it from another pc by entering the following into an explorer window address bar:

\\PCName\