The WebDAV protocol makes it very easy to access a readable and writable medium, e.g., a network drive. Some of the cloud storage servers, like the Yandex Disk, allow you to access the online storage through the WebDAV protocol. Using this protocol you can access your network drive in Windows just like you would use any other hard disk drive. But before you can access the network drive through WebDAV, you have to setup the WebDAV account in your computer. Here is how you can setup a WebDAV network drive in Windows 8:
- Right-click on Computer inside the File Explorer window and select Map Network Drive from the right-click context menu.
- This would open the Map Network Drive window. Here you have to choose the desired drive letter that you want to associate with the mapped networked drive. You can pick any available drive letter from A: to Z:. You have to enter the remote folder address in the Folder field. This can be an intranet address or the internet address. For example, the Yandex Disk service, you have to enter the https://webdav.yandex.com as the remote folder. You can choose the reconnect at-sign option which reconnects the mapped drive each time you sign-in. Click on the Finish button to proceed.
- If the remote server is password protected, then you would be asked for login credentials. You have to simply supply your login username and password to sign-in. You can choose to save your credentials in Windows, so that you do not have to enter the passwords again. Click OK to continue.
- If everything goes okay, you would see your mapped networked drive in the File Explorer. You can use this drive like any other drive, but only when you are connected to the internet. The label of the connected drive is its long remote address, but you can also change its label to anything you want.
The WebDAV protocol makes it very easy to connect to remote folders and use them as disk drives in your computer. Many web-hosting servers and cloud based storage servers now support this protocol and they can be integrated into Windows File Explorer for very easy access using the above instructions.