I am struggling to understand how Folder Data Stores for Portal/Server are useful. As far as I an tell, In Pro, I cannot publish a Feature Layer that references data that resides in the folder (e.g. from a Geodatabase or Shapefile), it must be published as a hosted layer and stored on the ArcGIS Data Store.
From Portal, I think there is a way to import all data at once from the folder as hosted services, but this seems little more than a small convenience. I think you can reference Geoprocessing scripts when publishing GP tools, which if fine.
What am I missing?
We store our raster images on a network file storage drive. The folder data store allows us to serve the imagery directly from a mosaic dataset in a file geodatabase on the network drive.
Thanks- good to know!