How to Map a Network Drive in Windows 10

Mapping a Network drive simply means creating a shortcut of a network drive or a folder on your local system. This shortcut will appear along with other partition drives and the network shortcut looks just like another hard drive or a USB drive. Mapping a Network drive on Windows 10 or any other windows version is useful to users in a network environment, both at home and at the office. If you are working on a tablet or a system with less storage space, you can easily use a mapped drive shortcut as an additional storage area. You can also use a mapped drive for saving the backups of your local system. Multiple users can work simultaneously on the Mapped drive or a folder. It also saves a lot of data transfer efforts since once a file is updated on a mapped drive, other users sharing this drive will be able to access the updated file automatically.

Steps to Map a Network Drive in Windows 10

From the desktop, open This-PC. Now from the top ribbon menu, click on Map Network Drive.

On the first screen of the wizard, it will ask you to assign a drive letter to the mapped drive. For example, if you have three partitions of your local hard disk, they are assigned drive letters C, D, and E. To maintain the continuity, you can select the next alphabet F, or any other drive letter of your choice from the drop-down list and assign it to the mapped drive.

You also need to select a network location by clicking on the browse button as shown in the screenshot below.

Make sure the radio button in front of “Reconnect at Sign-in” is selected. This is necessary since after you restart your system, the mapped drive will automatically disconnect from the network if this option is not selected. Finally, click Finish to complete the process.

You can now open This PC from file explorer and see that the new mapped drive is created under network locations.

You have seen that it merely takes not more than two steps to create a mapped drive in Windows 10. Apart from so many benefits, it has only one disadvantage the mapped drive will get disconnected during a network failure. You can also manually delete it by right-clicking on it and clicking on disconnect.