Skip to main content

Set Up File Server Source Group

  1. Navigate to Configuration > Source Groups and click Add Source. The source group wizard opens.

  2. Select File Server and click Next.

  3. Enter a Source Group Name.

  4. Select a service account from the Service Account dropdown, or click + to create one inline. See Service Accounts for details.

  5. Optionally, enter a Domain name to apply to all file servers in this source group. Leave blank if your servers are in a workgroup or if you want to specify credentials without a domain prefix.

  6. Click Add under File Servers and enter the hostname or IP address of each file server to include. Click Done when finished.

  7. Click Test Connection to verify connectivity. Each server displays a Connected or Failed status. Resolve any failures before proceeding.

  8. Click Next.

  9. Enable the scan types you want to run:

    Access scan:

    • Toggle Access to enable scanning of file permissions and access controls.
    • Under Include Shares, select All shares to scan every share on the server, or Custom selection to specify a list of shares to include.
    • Optionally, add share paths to the Exclude Shares field to skip specific locations. Wildcards are supported (for example, \\fileserver\*\temp*).
    • Select Automatically enumerate hidden shares to include hidden shares in the scan. Use the Exclude Hidden Shares field to exclude specific hidden shares (for example, ADMIN$, C$, IPC$).
    • Select Include file-level permission data to collect permissions at the file level in addition to folder level. This increases scan time.
    • Set Workers to control the number of concurrent threads used during enumeration. The default is 3. The valid range is 1–20.
    • Set Scan Depth to limit how many directory levels deep the scan traverses. The default is 50.

    Sensitive Data scan:

    • Toggle Sensitive Data to enable scanning of file contents for sensitive data patterns.
    • Configure share selection using the same options as the Access scan above.
    • Select Inherit from Global Settings to use the sensitive data types configured at the system level, or disable this option to configure types for this source group specifically.
    • If configuring types directly, enable each sensitive data type you want to detect and assign a classification label.
    • Select Run OCR to scan images, screenshots, and scanned documents for sensitive text using optical character recognition (OCR). This increases processing time.

  10. Under Scanner Location, select System scanner to run scans from the Access Analyzer service, or select Custom scanner to use a deployed scanner. See Scanners for details.

  11. Under Scan Schedule, select when to run the scan:

    • Now — Starts the scan immediately after setup completes.
    • At — Runs the scan once at a specific date and time.
    • Advanced — Runs the scan on a recurring schedule defined by a cron expression.

  12. Click Complete Setup.

What happens next​

Access Analyzer creates the source group and a scan for each file server you added. If you selected Now, the enabled scans start immediately.

To check scan progress, navigate to Configuration > Scan Executions.

Edit a source group​

To modify an existing file server source group, navigate to Configuration > Source Groups, select the source group, and click Edit. The wizard reopens with your current configuration pre-populated. You can update the source group name, service account, file servers, and scan settings.