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Step 1: Click the Start menu and select Windows Explorer from the resulting drop-down menu. Skip ahead to how to map a network drive in Mac OS X.

Additionally, check out our top picks for the best external hard drives and our basic guide on how to buy an external hard drive. Here’s our guide on how to map a network drive. Fortunately, both Windows and Mac OS X make it easy to map a network drive, and neither method requires more than five minutes of your time. However, granting access to networked drives can be tedious.

You could back up your data on an external hard drive, but what if you need to access important files or information that’s located on a computer other than your own? Mapping networked drives grants users remote access to content stored on a server or network-attached storage device.
