There can be many situations in which you would want to mount a remote folder as a local folder. It may be that you want to browse the photos on windwos and have the thumbnail.db created, or there may be users who want to access files using a logical drive , than going with an ftp client.
Typically the mounting is done either by connecting to a VPN ( which is a little complicated) or through Webdev ( which is not supported in windows 7 natively). I was looking for an easier alternative and the solution came from a command line utility ( or 2 if you want to run in invisible mode) both of which are freeware.
1. FTPuse ( Download). With Ftpuse, you can mount an ftp site as a network drive in windows. the syntax is
ftpuse z: ftp.myftpsite.com password /USER:username
The only problem with ftpuse is that it runs in foreground which means that the command prompt window must not be closed. If you close the window, the process stops and you lose your mounted drive. The solution to this is to use quiet
2. Quiet (Download.) Quiet can spawn a process in background, releasing your window that can be closed. Its similar to running a task in background in linux with &.
There you are, you can make a batch file that runs 1 command alone and gets you access to your remote FTP folder as a logical drive in windows.
Note : To run quiet, make sure that your parameters to ftpuse are in commas like so, if you don’t quiet doesn’t know the parameter from the command and executes each parameter as a command , complaining with no command found message.
quiet ftpuse “z: ftp.myftpsite.com secret /USER:myusername”