How to map network drives to a drive letter in Explorer
Background
On Windows systems where you have a central server PC running Windows Server or Windows Small Business Server, it is usual to create folders that are accessed by network users from their own PCs rather than each user saving their files on their own "My Documents" folder.
The reasons for this are twofold:
- First, having files stored centrally on a server means that all users can be given access to them (or certain groups of users in the case of sensitive files like payroll or accounts), this means you have one central location that all users can see rather than each user having multiple copies and the danger of the file getting mixed up across different versions.
- The second benefit is that Administrators like me can ensure that the server backs up these files each evening when staff are fast asleep in their beds, so so that should there be a fire or some other disaster, there is an ability to recover all these important files.
How to Map Drive Letters To These Folders
In order to access these folders from client PCs, the user, or more likely a techie like me needs to map the remote folder to a drive letter on the client PC.
Mapping drives is considered "old hat" nowadays as newer versions of Windows have gone more for saving network paths as shortcuts in the user's favourites folder which is a perfectly fine way of doing it, but a lot of organisations I find prefer to refer to a location as the "T drive" rather than "\\ServerName\Accounts".
To map network drives you need to open the server using Windows Explorer. To get there press Windows + E. In Explorer navigate to the Server's shares. On my network the server's name is "BIGBLUE" so to see the available shares I would modify the address bar from "Computer" to "\\Bigblue":
Once you have entered "\\ServerName" press RETURN or ENTER on the keybard and any shares on the remote server will appear. If you need permission to access the remote server you may be asked for network credentials to access the shared folders. Normally though, if your PC is properly joined to the domain you won't be asked for this.
To map a drive letter to one of the shares, let's use the "Backup" share on my server, you just right-click the shared folder as shown above and on the pop-up menu that appears you will get the option "Map Network Drive":
