Today we’re going to show you how to view users on Windows 10 who are currently accessing shares you have set up on your computer!
If you have several computers connected to each other on your home network, and Set up shares on your computer then it might be interesting to have a look at see who is currently accessing one of your shares.
To see this you can go to the Computer Management of Windows 10, where you can centrally display your look at the shares you have set up and manage them.
Unfortunately, the procedure in our described tutorial is only possible if you have installed the Windows 10 Professional variant.
Open the Computer Management console
The quickest way to open the computer administration is to type in the word compmgmt or compmgmt.msc enter.
Here compmgmt means the abbreviation for computer management and compmgmt.msc is a command to call management console computer administration.
You will see the Computer Management in the search result, please click once to open it.
If you have opened the computer administration, then you will find in the left area below computer administration a few more subsections.
If these are not displayed automatically, please click on the arrow in front of the System area to display the subordinate areas below it.
This should then look something like this.
Now click on the arrow in front."Shared folder", to show you the subsections for these settings.
Here is the Subsection Shares.
If you click only on the Shares section, then all the shares you have set up yourself and the shares defined by the system will be displayed in the right pane of the window.
So please do not be surprised. Even if you haven’t shared too many folders on your computer yet, there are quite a few shares here.
Especially interesting at this point are the shares defined by the system.
Every partition of a hard disk that is mounted in your Windows 10 system via a drive letter automatically gets a predefined share name, which is composed of the drive letter and a $ sign.
If you have more than one hard disk on your computer and you have split them into different partitions, this list might look a bit longer here.
However, we do not want to deal specifically with set up shares, but on active users on your network who are currently accessing a share on your computer.
This kind of information is provided to you in another sub-section, which is the Sessions area.
Show open sessions (active accesses to shares)
So now we leave the Shares area and click once on the Sessions area below it.
If you use the Sessions area If you have clicked on the "Shared folder" button, then all users in your network who are currently accessing a share that you have set up on your computer will be displayed in the right-hand pane.
In our case this is only one user.
If you are now interested in which files are open for reading via these shares, just click on the "Open Files" section located under the Sessions section.
Maybe you are wondering what the point of our tutorial is?
On the one hand you can have a look at Get an overview of what shares exist on your computer.
Maybe there is one or the other share you don’t remember and which should not exist anymore.
In such a case you can delete the share right here via this admin console.
With this you prevent that in the future contents of this folder will be accessed via this share.
Possibly there are files in this shared folder, which are actually not intended for other eyes at all.
Furthermore it is also interesting to know who is accessing shares on your computer in your network.
In a small private home network at home this information might not be correct, but if you are in a larger network, I think it is very interesting to know how your configured share is used or not. who is accessing this configured share.