The BarracudaDrive Secure File Server

The WebDAV Server is one of five plugins delivered with the BarracudaDrive Web Server.

• WebDAV versus SMB/CIFS

  You may be familiar with sharing files via your company file server using SMB/CIFS on your local Intranet. This is suitable for a closed network, but unsafe over the Internet. WebDAV is different from SMB as it uses HTTP for transporting files and is designed, from the ground up, to be secure on the internet. The HTTP protocol is the same protocol used by web-browsers. WebDAV can also use HTTPS, Secure and encrypted HTTP, allowing no one to eavesdrop on your file transfer. The Secure File Server can bypass company firewalls and proxies as the communication protocol is HTTP. Consequently, it is possible to securely access your files from anywhere.

• Native client support

  WebDAV clients are native to Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.. One simply mounts a drive from one of these operating systems to one or several remote computers. The following image shows how Web Folders might look in Microsoft Windows. Web Folders is Microsoft's built in Windows WebDAV client.

The image to the left shows how Microsoft Web Folders looks like when browsing a remote server. WebDAV is an open standard and you can select from a wide variety of commercial and non commercial WebDAV clients when connecting to the BarracudaDrive Secure WebDAV File Server. See our 3'rd party resource page for a list of a few WebDAV clients.

• Hacker safe

  The BarracudaDrive Secure File Server is rock solid secure and prevents unauthorized access to your PC. The BarracudaDrive File Server comes with a user manager that lets you control the amount of access other users have to your PC. You specifically set permissions for each individual user or group of users.

• Next generation FTP

  The BarracudaDrive Secure File Server is much easier to use than a typical FTP server since you access the remote file server as a standard drive. WebDAV is a more modern protocol than FTP and can be seen as the successor to the FTP protocol.

• Extra features

  The BarracudaDrive Secure File Server also includes a Web File Manager that makes it possible to use a standard browser for uploading and downloading files.

• Calendar server

  Another useful feature of the WebDAV protocol is to use the WebDAV server as a calendar server. For example, you can set up a private calendar application on your home computer that can be accessed from anywhere. You can also set up a shared calendar for a group of users and have the group subscribe to the calendar file on the server.

• Free calendar applications

  There are a number of WebDAV compliant calendar applications such as iCal in OS X, the KDE KOrganizer, and the Mozilla Calendar.