If you want to be able to access your machines remotely when you're away from home, you'll need to forward ports on your router or set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network). That's all you have to do to enable these basic sharing services on your Windows PC, but doing so will only allow you to access them from other computers on your local home network.

Click the Share button to enable sharing for that folder.

Unless you want read-only access, click Read and change it to Read/Write.

Choose Everyone from the drop-down menu and then click the Add button.

Locate the folder you want to share and right click on it.

If not, here's how to do it (on Windows 7/Vista): Chances are you actually enabled file sharing when you installed Windows. For Windows, we like PuTTY.įile Access with Windows File Sharing (SMB) Of all the ways to remotely access your files, SMB is the easiest to set up. To connect to your server remotely via SSH, you'll need an SSH client.

If you want to access your files over FTP or SFTP remotely, you'll need an application that supports those protocols.

If you're setting up freeSSHd and want to be able to use SFTP, be sure to tick the box beside SFTP.

Enter a username and password for the user you want to add and tick the box next to Shell.

Click it, and then click Add to add a user.

In the Settings panel, you'll be presented with a lot of tabs but the one you want first is Users.

Right click the system tray icon and choose Settings.

Once these tools are installed, launch them and you'll be able to access them from your system tray.

Download and install the server software you want, and choose to run freeSSHd/freeFTPd as a system service so you don't need to be logged in to access them.

Also, if you want to set up SSH to connect to your computer remotely over SSH and use SFTP (Secure FTP) for added security, the same site has a free SSH server called freeSSHd that you can download as well. While you can enable FTP as a service in Windows, this has become increasingly more complex in Windows 7 and Vista so we're going to use a free tool called freeFTPd. File Access with FTP, SFTP, and SSH Next we need to add file sharing.

Home movie server