Nokia N8 Help Guide: Sharing Home PC Hard Drive as a Network Drive on the Phone

I have previously shown you how to map an online storage service as a network drive on Nokia N8. In this post, I will help you setup a Web-Dav Server on your Home PC and map it as a network drive on your phone. The mode of connection between the PC and your phone will be your home Wifi network. Hence,you won't need a data connection and there will no extra charges from your network operator. This is a totally free solution for sharing files within your local Wifi network. Thus, you can use your PC as a Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Prerequisites

1. BarracudaDrive Free Edition Home Server Software - Download Here
2. A Wifi Network in your home.
3. You gotta be a bit techie and need some patience :-)

Getting Started

WebDav Server Setup

After having downloaded the Web-Dav Server software, you need to install the same on your PC. The setup is very simple. Simply run the 'BarracudaDrive.exe' file after unzipping the entire content of the downloaded zip file in a specific folder. Now, locate the BarracudaDrive icon in the task-bar. Right click on the icon and select the 'Start Page' option. This will open a new IE window, click on the Setup button from the left hand side of the screen and follow the instructions (refer to the video below). Afterwards, click on the Settings link from the top right hand side of the page. Now select the 'Administrator Panel' below the Settings header on the page. This opens up a new window with the administration panel. In this panel, you can select the folders that you wish to share on the WiFi network. You can also specify the IP addresses that should be able to access the server. I have added '192.168.0.*' as the allowed IP address which means any PC on my local Wifi network will be able to access the server. No body from the World Wide Web can access the server so you may not worry about exposing your PC to the outside world.

Mapping WebDav Server on N8

The entire process remains the same as shown in this post. However, the Web-Dav URL will be different. The URL for accessing your local home server will be 'https://<your local network ip of home pc>/dav/<shared folder or drive name>'. Example - 'https://192.168.0.103/dav/E' which means the shared E drive content from your PC will be accessible to Nokia N8 as a mapped drive. E drive in this case has been shared in the BarracudaDrive server settings. Also, ensure that you select your Wifi Access Point only. See the video below for more details.

Important Note

BarracudaDrive is no longer free from their main website. Please only use the URL provided above for downloading the same. This is an older version which was free once, the newer versions are paid and trial only. I was lucky enough to find the free version at the link above as most of the links on the internet now point only to the paid version. The file is tested with Kaspersky 2009 and does not contain any harmful element.