Files.com replaces an aging Windows file server or NAS with cloud storage that mounts as the exact same drive letters your filer used: J:, W:, Z:, at the exact same paths. Every login script, scheduled task, Office template, and line-of-business app keeps resolving. The path doesn’t change. Only the storage behind it does.
Keeping the old file server is the expensive option. That box is a liability with your name on it: one failed drive from a bad weekend, a backup you have to hope restores, and a refresh quote that just buys three more years of the same. Files.com retires it for good. IT sets the drive-letter mappings once and enforces them fleet-wide, new hires get the right drives on day one, and there’s no hardware to refresh, no closet, and no 2 a.m. page when a volume fills.
Copying the data is never the hard part. The hard part is everything that points at the old server: every J: mapping, every hard-coded path in a script or app. That is what kills the project. Files.com keeps all of it exactly as it is.
Pin a connection to J:, W:, or Z:, the exact letters your filer used. The Desktop App mounts that drive in Windows Explorer every time, instead of grabbing the next free letter, so the drive a user opens this morning is the one their muscle memory and their scripts expect.
An administrator decides which letters point at which folders in a Desktop Configuration Profile, then assigns it to one person, a Group, or the whole company. The drives mount on their own, locked so users cannot change them. You set it up once instead of touching every workstation.
Login scripts, scheduled tasks, Office templates, Access databases, VBA macros, and line-of-business apps with Z:\shared\ wired inside them keep working, because the letter and the path they point at never move.
Files download when someone opens them and upload when they save. Nothing is copied to every laptop up front, so a 2 TB share does not have to fit on a 256 GB laptop. The drive acts like the old NAS, and because the transfer is fast, it feels like a local disk.
Four things the platform already does, set up together to retire a file server.
In Mounted Drive Mode, the Desktop App shows cloud storage as a mapped drive in Windows or a named volume in macOS Finder. You set the drive-letter mappings centrally and push the installer out silently through SCCM, GPO, Intune, or PDQ. The move finishes across every machine at once instead of one desk at a time.
Behind the drive can be Files.com storage, or a Remote Server Mount pointed at the S3, Azure Blob, or Google Cloud bucket you already pay for. Either way the user sees the same drive letter. Where the files actually live is your call, and your users never have to know, so you can move storage later without retraining anyone.
Access follows the directory you already run, with SSO across Entra ID, Okta, Active Directory, Google, and any SAML provider, with SCIM. Nine permission levels per user or Group decide who can read, write, or contribute. When someone leaves, you cut their access in one place in your identity provider, and their drives go with them, so a departed employee can’t still reach files you forgot to revoke.
Some data has to stay local, like a manufacturing floor or a branch office. The Files.com Agent connects that SMB or NFS share to the platform over an outbound-only connection, so there are no inbound firewall changes and no VPN. Users reach it through the same drive letters as everything else.
“Files.com is a secure and easy-to-set-up product with multiple integration options for on-premise servers or any of the public cloud servers. We can have Active Directory-based corporate authentication as well as local user creation on their platform, and we can manage permissions independently.”
“Files.com is versatile — it can manage many different situations from a single platform. We've consolidated multiple tools onto it.”
Real companies. Real file flows. Real results.
When you retire a file server, you are usually choosing between another hardware refresh, a cloud-NAS gateway, Egnyte, or a tool like Box or SharePoint. Here is how Files.com stacks up against each.
Files.com keeps the drive letters and the hard-coded paths your scripts and apps depend on. Egnyte gives users a sync folder, not J: at the original path. The Files.com bill is usually a fraction of Egnyte’s, cheaper per gigabyte and per user.
Files.com keeps the paths with the Desktop App and a configuration profile, with no appliance to run. Nasuni and CTERA put an appliance in front of cloud storage that you have to deploy, patch, and maintain. And the same Files.com storage is also a full sharing, automation, and audit platform, so it does more than the gateway it replaces.
A new NetApp, Isilon, or HPE filer leaves you the same single point of failure, the same backup burden, the same maintenance contract, and the same end-of-life conversation in three years. Files.com routinely lands at a lower total cost, with no appliance, no support contract, and no refresh cycle, so the three-year clock never starts again.
Files.com is the one option where the storage moves and every drive letter and hard-coded path stays put. Box, SharePoint, and Dropbox give users a new sync folder, and none of them can show the cloud as J: or Z: at the exact same paths. With a sync folder you go through every script and app to fix the paths by hand.
The only reason a hardware refresh feels safer than the cloud is the drive letters. Files.com keeps those, so the safer choice is also the cheaper one. Files.com publishes its pricing, so you see the number before you ask.
That turns “we’d kill the file server if we could fix all those paths” into a weekend job. The move actually finishes, because the paths never change.
The FTP or SFTP server your partners connect to is a separate retirement, and Files.com takes that one over without partners changing anything: same hostname, same host key, same credentials.
The storage that replaces the box in the closet comes with the audit log, identity, and compliance a file server was never built to give you.
The storage that replaces the filer is held off-site, encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit. Every file action is written to an audit log no one can edit. The box in the closet gave you none of that.
SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, and CSA STAR, with a HIPAA BAA and GDPR DPA available. Used in production by banks, healthcare, and other regulated industries.
SSO and SAML against Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Active Directory, Google, and OneLogin, with SCIM provisioning, IP allowlisting, and password policies.
Planning the move means drive-letter profiles, silent deployment, and identity. That is the kind of thing you want a real engineer on the other end of the line for.
The people who answer the phone are engineers who know the platform, not a tier-one queue reading a script. When a drive mapping or a profile misbehaves, you reach someone who can fix it.
Get drive-letter profiles, identity, and storage stood up fast. Strategic enterprise deployments get our onboarding people embedded as forward deployed engineers.
Thorough docs cover the EXE-installer requirement for Mounted Drive Mode, silent fleet deployment, and Configuration Profile precedence. You can plan the whole cutover before you start it, instead of finding the gotchas mid-migration.
What the shared drive becomes once it is folders on a platform instead of a box in a closet.
Each department, project and business unit gets its own folder tree with group-based permissions from the directory, so the finance share is invisible to engineering without an ACL anyone maintains by hand.
Staff in a branch or a newly acquired company reach the shared drive over HTTPS from the desktop app, so the slow tunnel back to headquarters and the server in the branch closet both go away.
Every move, rename and delete is in the audit log with the user and the time, and versioning brings the file back. The question that used to end a Friday now takes a minute.
Payroll, legal and executive documents go to internal recipients through a permissioned folder with a record, instead of an email attachment that lives forever in a dozen mailboxes.
The shift had to unite large-file exchange, departmental work, and outside-partner access across a distributed manufacturing footprint.
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A pilot kept familiar drive letters and demanding Excel workflows intact while moving remote file access from latency-sensitive SMB to HTTPS.
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A parallel migration brought a growing, daily-use design repository under the CAPA program’s existing controls while manufacturers, labs, and API integrations kept connecting as before.
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Files.com gave Athennian one governed layer for client intake, in-place document work, regional data residency, and audit logging.
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What IT teams ask most when retiring a filer onto Files.com.
Install the Files.com Desktop App in Mounted Drive Mode and pin it to the same drive letters your file server used. Copy the data to Files.com storage or to a bucket you already own, assign a Desktop Configuration Profile so every workstation mounts the correct letters automatically, and retire the hardware. Every login script, scheduled task, and hard-coded path keeps resolving because the path doesn’t change. Only the storage behind it does.
Files.com keeps mapped drive letters and hard-coded paths working after the move, on Windows. IT maps cloud folders to specific drive letters and enforces those mappings fleet-wide through a Desktop Configuration Profile. Use J:, W:, Z:, whatever your organization standardized on. Office templates, VBA macros, Access databases, and line-of-business apps with paths like Z:\shared\ wired inside them keep working. That is what lets a file-server move actually finish, instead of turning into a year of fixing paths one app at a time.
On macOS, Files.com Mounted Drive Mode presents a named network volume under Finder Locations rather than a drive letter, because drive letters are a Windows concept. Desktop Configuration Profiles for centrally enforced mappings are Windows-only. Mac users get the same folders and the same paths under a consistent volume name. Windows users get the exact same drive letters.
Files.com runs the mounted drive against the cloud storage you already pay for. Point a Remote Server Mount at your existing Amazon S3, Azure Blob, or Google Cloud Storage bucket and the mounted drive reads and writes there directly, without a second copy of the data. The backend is an administrative decision the user never sees. They just see the drive letter.
Drop the Files.com Agent on a server in your datacenter and it bridges that local SMB or NFS share into the platform over an outbound-only connection, with no inbound firewall changes and no VPN. Users reach it through the same Desktop App and the same drive letters as the cloud-backed shares, so a phased or hybrid cutover looks identical to a full one from the workstation.
Files.com maps access to your identity provider. SSO across Entra ID, Okta, Active Directory, Google, and any SAML provider, with SCIM provisioning, means a new hire’s drive access appears when their directory account is created and disappears when it is deactivated. Nine permission levels per user or Group decide who reads, writes, or only contributes to each folder. A profile attached to a Group gives every current and future member the right drive mappings automatically.
Files.com works as the shared drive for a team that never had a file server. Define the drive letters and named volumes fresh, let folders follow each employee’s identity, and handle on- and offboarding in your identity provider. A remote-first team gets governed shared storage that reaches every laptop, without standing up a VPN to a file server that never existed.
Files.com usually costs less than keeping the existing filer and less than Egnyte. Against the incumbent hardware, it carries no appliance, no support contract, and no refresh cycle, so the total cost typically lands below another hardware round. Against Egnyte, Files.com is generally a fraction of the cost, cheaper per gigabyte and per user, and it keeps the drive letters Egnyte’s sync folder cannot. Files.com publishes every tier and overage price.
Files.com is SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, and CSA STAR, with a HIPAA BAA and GDPR DPA available, AES-256 at rest, and TLS in transit, run as a managed service for 15+ years with zero breaches. Every file action lands in an immutable audit log, and you choose which of eight storage and compute zones the storage sits in. Every current attestation is published.
Search Files.com history for the path. The audit log shows the delete with the user, the client or protocol, the timestamp and the IP address, and the folder can be restored from retention in the same view. On a Windows file server that answer usually required auditing nobody had turned on.
Give the acquired company its own folder tree, or its own child site, on the parent’s Files.com, and let its staff sign in with their existing identity provider alongside yours. Shared folders between the two are a permission rather than a tenant migration, so collaboration starts on day one and the domain merge happens on its own timeline.
Yes. Groups carry folder permissions, and Folder Admins manage users inside their own area without site-wide rights, so a public-sector agency or a multi-department company runs one governed site where each department administers its own tree.
The same drive letters, the same paths, on cloud storage you never have to refresh, with the governance and audit the old file server never had. Stand up a drive-letter profile on a real workstation during the 7-day free trial.
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