Samba or SMB shares can be mapped as Network Drive in Windows operating systems. The mapped network drive is assigned with a drive letter for easy access and displayed in the File Explorer . In this tutorial, we examine how to map and access network drives in Windows operating systems. This process is very same for all of the Windows operating system versions like Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11.
Map Network Drive
The Map Network Drive menu can be opened via the File Explorer. First, we opened File Explorer and then click on the This PC left navigation pane. After clicking the “This PC” on the menu var the Computer tab appears and select the Map network drive like below.
In the Map Network, the Drive screen set the drive letter via the Drive: line. In this example, we set as drive letter Z: . The Folder: is used to specify remote share location with IP or hostname information. In the following example, we use “\192.168.31.129\Users\ismail\Desktop\BACKUP” as the remote network map destination. Reconnect at sign-in option is selected if we want to connect this drive after a reboot or sign in again with this user. The mapped network drive operation uses current user credentials by default and if we need to use different user credentials Connect using different credentials options can be selected to provide different user credentials.
Access Mapped Network Drive
After connecting the network drive it can be accessed via the File Manager. On the left pane find the mapped drive name which is BACKUP in this example and click on it to open a regular path. Also, we can see that the complete path of the mapped network drive is listed on the address bar of the File Explorer.
