Shadow Folders?

[pogaz]

What is the purpose of shadow folders? I know what they are (essentially putting files in a local location), but can someone give some examples on why one would want to use them? I'm guessing that the benefit is not to Vault itself (e.g. increasing performance...in fact, it might even negatively affect performance since it has to additionally write out to the filesystem), but just as a benefit to the the user (e.g. perhaps they need that way to zip, copy, transfer, etc, those files).

I really don't think I have a use for shadow folders from what I suspect their purpose is, but I would still like to learn about the feature in case we could benefit from it.

Thanks,
Paul

[lbauer]

Some users use shadow folders to update a test website, or to automatically get the latest version to test code.

For instance, QA users might not have licenses to use Vault, but can access the latest version of files for testing.