The IIS answer solves a different problem
Search for a way to run a WebDAV server on Windows and you land in IIS documentation: role services, authoring rules, application pools, screenshots from Server 2012. That path works. It just answers a question most people asking it are not actually asking.
IIS publishes a folder that already sits on the machine's own disk. The usual reason someone wants WebDAV is the reverse — the files live in an S3 bucket, in OneDrive, on a NAS, on a VPS behind SFTP, and the goal is to see them as a drive letter in File Explorer without downloading everything first. Install the role service, enable an authentication module, write authoring rules, pick an app pool identity, work out why anonymous authentication keeps winning, and what you have at the end is HTTP access to C:\inetpub\something.
What you want is smaller: a local server, running only for you, that speaks WebDAV on one side and talks to your storage accounts on the other.
Starting the server takes about ten seconds
AnyStorage has a WebDAV server built in. Open the app, go to Services in the sidebar, pick the WebDAV tab, press Start. The endpoint is http://127.0.0.1:3211.
Details worth knowing before you map anything:
- HTTP Basic authentication is always on. The default username is anystorage; the password is 24 random characters generated on first use. Both are editable, with a Regenerate button and copy buttons for URL, username and password.
- The port is configurable anywhere in 1 to 65535. We default to 3211 because it rarely collides with anything else.
- We bind to 127.0.0.1 by default. A LAN access option binds 0.0.0.0 instead, and the app warns you when you enable it: the current version has no TLS, so those Basic credentials would cross the network in plaintext.
- The toggle persists. Leave the server enabled and it comes back up with the app on next launch.
Every storage connection currently connected in the app appears as a folder at the WebDAV root, named after the connection. S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, SFTP, FTP, plain local folders — 20 connection types in all. One caveat we would rather state up front: connections attach lazily, so after restarting the app you need to open a connection once inside AnyStorage before it shows under the WebDAV root. Connections you add later appear without restarting the server.
No driver installs here. No WinFsp, no kernel-mode filesystem, no admin prompt to start the server.
Where a WebDAV server on Windows actually gets hard
The server half is the easy half. Windows' own WebDAV client is the part that fights back, and has been for years.
The mapping itself is ordinary: File Explorer, This PC, Map network drive, paste http://127.0.0.1:3211, sign in with the username and password from the app. When that fails, it is nearly always one of three things.
The WebClient service is not running. Microsoft has this component marked deprecated, and as of 2026 it ships set to Manual on most Windows 10 and 11 machines, which means it often simply is not up. Open services.msc, find WebClient, start it. The symptoms of a stopped WebClient are "The folder you entered does not appear to be valid" and System error 67, "The network name cannot be found."
Windows refuses Basic auth over plain HTTP. Under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters there is a value named BasicAuthLevel. Its default, 1, permits Basic credentials over SSL only. Our endpoint is http on loopback, so you need to set it to 2 and restart the WebClient service afterwards. Error 0x80070043 is the usual signature. The rule makes sense on a hostile network, less so for 127.0.0.1, but Windows does not draw that distinction. Editing it needs an administrator account — the one elevation step in the whole exercise.
Copies over 50 MB fail. FileSizeLimitInBytes, same registry key, defaults to 50,000,000 bytes. That is 50 MB, not the 50 GB people often remember it as. Anything larger returns 0x800700DF, "The file size exceeds the limit allowed and cannot be saved." You can raise the value as far as 0xFFFFFFFF, decimal 4294967295, roughly 4 GB, and restart WebClient again. Past 4 GB the native client is simply out.
Skip the native client when it matters
None of those three limits live in the server. They belong to Windows' WebDAV client, so any third-party WebDAV client sidesteps all of them, and so does AnyStorage itself.
Use the mapped drive for what it is good at: browsing, opening documents in their normal apps, scrubbing through video. Reads are streamed with HTTP range support, so seeking into a file does not pull the whole thing down first. For a multi-gigabyte archive or a bulk copy, use the app's transfer UI, where none of those registry ceilings apply.
Our own limits, stated plainly. The WebDAV server is read-only on the free tier; writes, deletes and renames need a Pro license, and you can keep read-only on Pro if you prefer. Top-level connection folders cannot be renamed or deleted through the mount, and a file cannot move directly between two different connections — copy it down locally in between. There is no file locking, so this is not for several people editing one document at once. It gets your own storage into your own Explorer window, and the only thing you installed was one app.