Hello:
I have been reading a lot about free WebDAV clients for Windows (with drive letter assignation) and I was wondering which is the best option nowadays, in 2023.
For the moment it looks like RaiDrive and cyberDuck are the best situated APPs, but none of them are free of advertisement or donations.
Thanks a lot.
My best regards.
Windows supports mounting WebDAV as drives out of the box.
Why should anyone install additional proprietary stuff with ads??
Becuase Windows doesn’t handle it very well.
For example, I am having issues connecting to the server. Everyday I have to re-connect to the Files Server.
Thanks.
The problems are well known.
But you have to set it up correctly, and Windows also offers enough in-house tools for that:
Create a textfile, call it something like mount nextcloud on drive Z.bat with the following content:
@echo off
cls
echo Delete existing connections
net use * /delete /yes
echo Connecting network drive
echo.
net use Z: \\%your-nextcloud.com%@ssl\remote.php\dav\files\%user%\ /user:%user% %password%
echo.
echo connection successfull
in this file you have to replace
%your-nextcloud.com% with the url of you nextcloud server,
%user% with the user you want to connect to
and
%password% with the app password that you created for this mount in your /settings/user/security section on the webfrontend.
Now you can add it to your autostart folder as follows:
Press the “Windows” key + R together,
enter shell:startup
Drag the batch file into the folder.
Alternatively, you can add the file to the registry’s autostart mechanism in:
\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
If you don’t want it to auto mount, you can simply keep the file somewhere and as soon as you double klick on it, your drive wil be mounted.
I assume you meant Mountain Duck (https://mountainduck.io/).
I’m mildly familiar with it as it was the most serious contender (on paper) if I ever needed something more than the built-in OS support.
It is by the Cyberduck folks and shares the same backend library (and supports mounting). It’s actively developed (with quality changelogs - yay - Changelog) and free of advertisements.
It is a paid product (albeit relatively affordable - although I realize affordability is locale specific and I’m not sure if they have pricing for different markets). The backend is open source: GitHub - iterate-ch/cyberduck: Cyberduck is a libre FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Microsoft Azure & OneDrive and OpenStack Swift file transfer client for Mac and Windows. if that’s important to you.
That said, both of the ones you mentioned appear to have evaluations. Have you tried them out?
There are options without ads too.
The main reasons to use beyond the built-in OS options I’ve encountered are:
Though with that last one you start to venture back into sync client behavior territory if the caching is for offline writes…
Hi, in my case, I tried to use the windows native client, but it doesn’t support long path (limited to 255 characters)… For longer path, folders seem to be empty, so it’s unusable for us.
So I’m also looking for a better webdav client with drive letter assignation. I’ve tested mountainduck and cloudmounter that are working well, but are quite expensive for me.
I’ve tested raidrive, but I found it really slow.
If someone knows about an opensource webdav client I’m still really interested !
After further tests, I get bugs with mountainduck (“0 byte files”) and with cloudmounter (share violation error when saving office files), so I don’t find any working solution…
Finally I’ve tested a bit more mountainduck with the smart synchronization mode, and it’s working well ! Actually, it seems to be able to replace nextcloud desktop client, as it also allows to sync folders locally.
You can choose to index or not all files, so on big data it’s better not to index, it’ll just index files and folders you access. It’s also able to lock files while editing, so that 2 persons can’t edit the same file and risk to overwrite modifications.
I find it’s a shame to use another webdav client and not nextcloud’s one, but I’m also relieved to find a working solution, for a 30 persons company…
Hi, the Nextcloud client is quite slow when it comes to synchronize many files… its last two versions do not work well with S3 compatibility…
In my case I am testing with https://www.raidrive.com so far I have had no problems.
Ended up with Raidrive too after a long journey with trouble, just works, no headaches since. Free version with ads or no ads for a couple of US$/month.
I have just migrated more than 800 google drive accounts, I have implemented a nextcloud in google cloud (GCP) S3 compatibility, unfortunately I have groups of users that usually save up to 1 million files. With the nextcloud client it is impossible to manage them, the first sync is extremely slow for when you have so much data. I can’t even upgrade to 3.10 desktop client I have to stay on 3.9.4 as with S3 you can’t upload files larger than 10MB.
I have no other way than Webdav, and among the free clients I only found this one that works, I tried AirDrive but it can’t even open a file. (anything that uses dokan library doesn’t work well with nextcloud).
I think it’s bad that it uses ADS, but that can be prevented from the firewall, I think that’s its only problem.
I’m still looking for something similar to RaiDrive but free even if it only allows a single connection.
Has anyone tried RCLONE?