Hi Everyone, today I'm going to be showing you how to map a network drive in Windows 10
This is very, very simple
First of all you'd want to open "File Explorer". Now normally you can do this by clicking the stat button
Down in the bottom left
but you may not actually have it there
So, your options of opening file explorer will be either using the Windows key and "S"
So you can actually search for it
or, I'll show you a little tip where you can right click onto the desktop
choose personalise
Then hit the "start" button
and then "choose which folders appear on start"
So at the moment you can see a lot of these are set to off. So if I click down here there is nothing shown.
However....
If I enable file explorer and I want to include network [you don't need to include network]
So we can now close out of this [window] and if we go back down here [start button]
You can now see that Network and File Explorer
So, now you're in File Explorer you want to choose "This PC"
because you want to add/map a network drive here
To do that, just go up to the top of here
Hit the button and choose "map network drive"
Now once you're in the network drive [window] you can assign
any drive letter that is available
So you'll see that I've already got C, D and E here assigned so I can either continue that on
with any letter from there [the list], or I can just choose the default one that it shows, which is Z.
Then from here your network attached storage device, PC or server that you're mapping a drive to
You can either browse your network [using the browse button] if the device is discoverable across the network
or you can manually type in the address as you can see in the example here.
you can type \\ServerName\FolderName
So, if I wanted to I can type in \\Paragon\YouTube
Now that would allow me to connect to the Youtube folder stored on my NAS.
However..
I wouldn't recommend using server names because some people to tend to have trouble with them.
and in my opinion it's always better to use the actual IP address of the device. Especially if you've used a fixed IP address.
Now once you've typed in the address that you're going to be using for it.
you then want to ensure you have selected "re-connect at sign in"
So, this is when you re-start your PC
The mapped drive will still be there.
And because my NAS has it's own authentication I want to connect using different credentials to what I use to log into my PC.
ok, so that's all that done
Click finish
and then
what we'll want to do is type in the
username and password for it. So, that's going to be admin and my password.
and then
hit ok and you can see that its mapped this folder directly under the IP address with the Z affixiation.
Now, if we go back to "this PC"
you'll see that is appears under network locations
and you can see that I've got
got 3TB free of 5.3TB of the drives that are currently stored in the NAS
and that is mapped directly to that folder
So whenever I am doing YouTube videos I can now simply transfer it through
File Explorer, or what used to be called Windows Explorer.
Erm, a quick tip. If you want to quickly go to File Explorer without having to go to the start menu
If you right click
down here and choose "pin to takbar"
That'll actually keep it there. So if we close all of these windows, you can still see that the icon remains there.
We can move that anywhere we want along the task bar.
and then whenever I want to jump back into it, it is simply 1 click and here I am in File Explorer.
So, that's all there really is to mapping a network drive through File Explorer.
Now, you can use the "net use" command should you wish to do so.
If you want to learn more about this [command] then I will include a link to this webpage in the description below.
So you guys and girls can learn more about it as it has examples and explains further on how to use it.
but as a brief example, you will use these commands in the "command prompt".
To open the command prompt is Windows key + S and type "cmd" and then press Enter [on your keyboard].
and then this will open the command prompt for you
Essentially its the exact same process [as before] but you are manually typing it out. So you'd type
"net use" then the drive letter you wish to assign, for example: we will choose M.
colon (:)
Then space, then the server name or IP address
So, if we do the \192.168.0.20
backslash (\) and we'll choose "downloads"
and then
what we'll actually want to do, if we press Enter now it will map the network drive, but if i restart the PC
that drive will no longer be so we want it to be persistent, so we want it to stay there.
So, for that you want to do \P:Yes
After that, press Enter and it will say that it has been completed successfully.
To check this, if we go back into File Explorer we can see straight away that downloads folder from this IP address
has arrived without any problems.
These drives will stay here every time I restart my PC because they've been setup perfectly.
So, that's it. That's all there is to it.
If you do have any questions or you want to learn a bit more about it then drop a comment below.
I'll be happy to answer your questions.
If you're a Mac user and you'd like to see a similar tutorial on OS X then drop a comment below.
Let me know and I'll happily do that for you guys.
Until next time, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.