A mapped drive is just a shortcut to a drive that's physically located on a different computer.
The shortcut on your computer looks just like one for a local hard drive (like the C drive) with its own letter assigned to it, and opens as if it were, but all the files in the mapped drive are actually physically stored on another computer.
It's similar to a shortcut you may have on your desktop, like one used to open a picture file in your Pictures folder, but is instead used to access something from a different computer.
Mapped drives can be used to reach resources on a different computer on your local network, as well as files on a website or FTP server.
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Mapped drives provide the illusion of data being stored locally on your computer, it's perfect for storing large files, or large collections of files, somewhere else that has more hard drive space.
For example, if you have a small tablet computer that you use a lot, but have a desktop computer on your home network with a much bigger hard drive, storing files in a shared folder on the desktop PC, and mapping that shared location to a drive letter on your tablet, gives you access to far more space than you would otherwise have access to.
Some online backup services support backing up files from mapped drives, which means you can back up data not only from your local computer, but also any file you're accessing through a mapped drive.
Similarly, some local backup programs let you use a mapped drive as if it were an external HDD or some other physically attached drive. What this does is lets you back up files over the network to a different computer's storage device.
Another benefit is that multiple people can share access to the same files. This means data can be shared among co-workers or family members without the need to send emails back and forth when they're updated or changed.
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