So I want to have a feature on my website where I will be able to access my personal files from the website. Currently I am using .htaccess to prevent just anyone from viewing the file browser, but I will probably change that to some different method in the future. (Since apparently .htaccess is supposed to be really taboo)

There were two problem I needed to overcome. First, I basically wanted to share my entire second hard drive with limited access. So I added this line to the Apache configuration file :

Alias /media/ F:/

This allows me to route to the F drive by going to mywebsite.com/media/
Now I just needed to set up the directory permissions. I had this in the config file:

SetEnvIf PHP_AUTH_USER "USER" let_me_in
<Directory "F:/">
Options All
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from All
Allow from env=let_me_in
</Directory>

Even after I have logged in with .htaccess as the USER, it does not permit me to open the file. I thought that maybe the problem was outside of Apache, so I removed the deny and allow lines I have in there and I added, "Allow from All". I was then able to connect to the drive, but so was everyone else in the world. I also tried declaring my own enviornmental variable called "MEDIA_ACCESS" in the page that would call the files off of the drive and then I tried:

SetEnvIf MEDIA_ACCESS 1 let_me_in
<Directory "F:/">
Options All
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from All
Allow from env=let_me_in
</Directory>

and,

<Directory "F:/">
Options All
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from All
Allow from env=MEDIA_ACCESS
</Directory>

Neither of these worked. Does anyone have any idea what I could be doing wrong?