How to Mount a Network Drive on Mac

A network drive on a Mac is a mounted share — a folder on another machine that appears in Finder as if it were a disk. Connecting is one keystroke. Keeping it connected, and getting it to reconnect by itself, is where most of the frustration lives.

Connect Once

1. In Finder, press Command-K (or Go → Connect to Server).
2. Enter the address: smb://hostname/sharename for SMB, afp:// for older Apple shares.
3. Authenticate, and choose whether to save the password to Keychain.
4. The share appears under Locations in the Finder sidebar.

The hostname can be a name or an IP address. Names are more convenient and break more often — if a share that used to connect stops resolving, try the IP before assuming the server is down.

Mount from the Command Line

Useful for scripts, and useful for diagnosing whether the problem is Finder or the network:

mkdir -p ~/mnt/share
mount_smbfs //user@hostname/sharename ~/mnt/share

If this succeeds while Finder fails, the credentials or the Finder cache is the problem rather than the share. Unmount with umount ~/mnt/share.

Make It Reconnect Automatically

Add the server to System Settings → General → Login Items — the same list used for startup apps. macOS re-mounts saved servers at login, provided the share is reachable at that moment.

That “provided” is the catch. A laptop that logs in before Wi-Fi associates will fail, and macOS will not try again. Two workarounds:

• Delay the login item, or log in after the network is up
• Use a remount tool that retries on wake and on network change

A file manager that keeps its own connection list solves the same problem differently. ForkLift and Transmit both hold server bookmarks and reconnect on demand, which is often more reliable than a Finder mount for anything you access intermittently. Our guide to dual-pane file managers covers that category; Marta is the lighter option if you want a local file manager with network support rather than a transfer client.

The Two Failures That Explain Most Cases

Authentication succeeds and the share is empty. Usually a permissions problem on the server rather than the mount. Check that the account has read access to the specific share, not just to the server.

“There was a problem connecting to the server.” Frequently stale credentials in Keychain. Remove the entry in Keychain Access for the host and reconnect — macOS will prompt for a fresh password instead of retrying a cached one.

When the Share Is the Wrong Tool

A mounted share is convenient for a few files and poor for a working directory. Editors, version control and anything that writes temporary files behave badly over SMB, and the failure mode is silent corruption rather than an error. For active work, keep the project on the local disk and copy to the share.

For remote access to a whole desktop rather than a folder, the tools are different — our guide to remote connection managers covers that instead.