Mount OneDrive as a Network Drive on Windows and Mac

Microsoft ships sync. You asked for a drive

Search for this and you find two kinds of page: tutorials for a WebDAV address that stopped working, and vendors selling a virtual drive. Neither starts by saying what Microsoft actually gives you, so start there.

The official OneDrive app creates a folder inside your user profile, normally %USERPROFILE%\OneDrive, and keeps it in step with the cloud. With Files On-Demand on, the entries are placeholders that download when opened, so the folder is cheap in disk terms. What it is not is a drive letter, a mount point, or anything a batch script, a render node or an old application expecting Z:\ can address.

That gap is the whole reason this query exists. There are four ways to close it, and they are not equally good.

The subst route: a drive letter over the synced folder

subst is a documented Windows command that "associates a path with a drive letter". It is the shortest route from the OneDrive folder to Z:\, and it needs no service, no registry edit and no administrator rights.

subst Z: "%USERPROFILE%\OneDrive"
subst
subst Z: /d

Two limits matter. First, the mapping is per session: subst creates a virtual drive for the current logon and disappears at reboot, so it belongs in a logon script or a Task Scheduler task set to run at sign-in. Second, it is still the sync folder. Anything that walks the whole tree will hydrate placeholders and pull real bytes onto the disk, which is precisely what people mounting a 2 TB OneDrive are trying to avoid.

Also note what you cannot do: net use will not accept a local path. It wants a UNC path or a URL, which is why the WebDAV routes exist at all.

The WebDAV route, and why it disappoints

Personal OneDrive historically exposed a WebDAV endpoint of the form https://d.docs.live.net/<CID>, where the CID is the hexadecimal account identifier visible in the OneDrive web URL. Mapping it looks like this:

net use Z: https://d.docs.live.net/00A1B2C3D4E5F678 /user:you@example.com *

Treat that as legacy. Microsoft's own archive article on using the WebDAV redirector with OneDrive documents that accounts with two-step verification need an app password rather than the account password, and Microsoft Q&A threads through 2026 report the mapping failing outright with access-denied and network-name errors even when the site is added to trusted sites. Microsoft's guidance is the sync client. WebDAV mapping of personal OneDrive is tolerated, not supported.

Work or school accounts are in better shape. A SharePoint or OneDrive for Business library can be mapped with the UNC form the WebDAV redirector documents, \\server[@SSL][@port][\path], using the DavWWWRoot keyword for the server root:

net use Z: \\contoso.sharepoint.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\personal\alice_contoso_com\Documents

If that returns System error 67 has occurred or File Explorer shows Error code: 0x80070043, the cause is almost always the WebClient service being stopped, since Microsoft deprecated it in November 2023 and it is no longer started by default. The full list is in net use error 67 and WebDAV error 0x80070043. Expect the mapping to need re-establishing after each sign-in: Microsoft states that since Windows 7, Basic authentication credentials cannot be persisted by Credential Manager.

The approach AnyStorage takes

AnyStorage connects to OneDrive as one storage location among many, then publishes everything you have open through a WebDAV server running on your own machine. Open Services in the sidebar, switch to the WebDAV tab, press Start, and the endpoint is http://127.0.0.1:3211, with HTTP Basic auth always on: username anystorage by default, plus a 24-character password generated on first use, both with copy buttons.

Map that once and you have a drive letter whose folders are your connections: OneDrive next to an S3 bucket, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Alibaba Cloud OSS, Tencent Cloud COS, Google Drive, Dropbox, a WebDAV server, FTP, SFTP and local folders. One mapping, not one per service.

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters" /v BasicAuthLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f
net stop WebClient
net start WebClient
net use Z: http://127.0.0.1:3211/ /user:anystorage *

BasicAuthLevel has to be 2 because the endpoint is HTTP on loopback and Windows refuses Basic credentials over plain HTTP by default. That is a one-time change, and the traffic never leaves the machine.

Two honest limits: on the free tier the WebDAV mount is read-only, with read-write reserved for Pro, and the free tier covers two storage connections. Also, a connection appears under the WebDAV root only after you have opened it in the app in the current session, because connections connect lazily.

On macOS

macOS needs no equivalent of the WebClient service and no macFUSE kernel extension. In Finder, press Cmd+K, enter http://127.0.0.1:3211, supply the same credentials, and the volume appears under /Volumes like any network share. The sync-folder alternative on a Mac is ~/OneDrive or ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-<tenant>, which again is a folder rather than a volume. AnyStorage itself needs macOS 11 or newer; release 0.2.24 shipped on 23 September 2026 with brew install --cask kilerd/tap/anystorage as the quickest install.

Next steps

• The same job for Google Drive: mount Google Drive as a network drive
• The same job for Dropbox: mount Dropbox as a network drive
• When the mapping refuses to connect: Windows cannot connect to WebDAV