Moodle (Linking to a external folder)?

At the moment out school is in the progress of moving over to moodle which i've spent months working on and now comes the time I want to let moodle see our internal resources drive which is avaliable to view for students and all staff as a course so to speak...

I still want the functionality that they can click their R: drive to access it while on the school network, but while at home it'll be nice if they can log into moodle and still gain access to all the school resources... One way of doing this is to move all the resources into the moodledata dir where the course is held and then re map the drive letter for R: to the new location.

The issue with that is that the moodle server has only got 500gb of space unless the disk size on the SAN is increased. On top of that, i can see it taking a while to copy that quantity of data over.

The reason for this planning is because at the moment as with all schools, they store stuff all over the damn place... I want to centralise it so all they have to do is upload to one part of the school :).

Any advice?

There is a web dav module/patch available to Moodle which will do this. It's a patch to Moodle core though.

I'm interested how anyone else has tackled this problem

If moodle is hosted on linux you could use SMB webclient block, this allows access to home and shared drives via a web inteface.

Moodle.org: Modules and plugins

You could connect to an NFS share so the remote share appears as a local directory within your Moodle if your Moodle is on a Linux server.