Mapped Network Drives

Help & Support
1

Hello Everyone,

I have been digging and looking for a way to auto download Anime, Movies and TV shows … But so far nothing seems to be working … So I found Sonarr , but before I get into setting it up and stuff like that I wanted to know will it work with Mapped Network drives on a windows 11 machine ?

Thanks for your time have a great day.

2

Yes, but you cannot run it as a Windows Service as Windows services do not support mapped network drives. You have an option when installing, just make sure you don’t pick the option to install a service.

3

Cool thanks @markus101 for the information … I will have to look into getting this setup as it would be nice to automate things instead of spending an hour or more every other day looking at all website and such to see what i need to download.

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4

Since you’re just starting out, there’s a lot of guides and videos out there that don’t necessarily use optimal paths or settings.

Recommended is
https://trash-guides.info/
https://wiki.servarr.com/sonarr

5

Great thanks @fanboy will check them out just working on getting my media computer up to date and hopefully ready to go.

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6

Well, that’s only true if the service is set to run as SYSTEM, right?
If the service is set to run under a different account, that has appropriate permissions for Sonarr’s folders, and for network drives, then it should run just fine, shouldn’t it?

7

No, that’s not totally accurate. Services do not have access to Mapped Network Drives, they can access network shares, but Mapped Network Drives are not supported in services, this article right from MS goes into more detail. Some people (myself included) have used them with services, but eventually they fail, so it’s best to not rely on something that’s not supported by the OS.

Also never, ever, run Sonarr as LocalSystem, it’s effectively a super administrator. The default account is LocalService to enforce this and avoid issues with network access and services.

8

Sure, they can’t access “mapped drives”, but they can access UNC paths.
And, in a domain environment, if you assign permissions for a folder on one machine to a computer account of another machine, then a process running as SYSTEM on that machine, can access this folder over the network, using its UNC path. And you don’t have to provide any password.

Also, what does that mean “eventually they fail”? Mapped drives are for users. If UNC paths don’t work, then you have bigger problems.

PS:

Also never, ever, run Sonarr as LocalSystem, it’s effectively a super administrator.

I know this, and I’m not. I’m just saying it’s possible. Also, if you run it on a domain account, well… see above. (And it doesn’t have to be SYSTEM. I’ve given this as an example, because sometimes not having to provide a password can be useful.).

9

I’m only talking about Mapped Network Drives.

10

I use Sonarr with a lot of mapped drives, so just a quick tip: Choose your destination wisely if you use an array of network drives.

While it’s not difficult to update the Sonarr path a new media path, it is time intensive if you move a lot of media, as you will need to update each path for each program and either move the media with Sonarr or move the files yourself and update the path, in addition to transfers times.

Plan ahead and be sure the destination you save to is where you believe it will remain whenever possible to avoid tons of work and waiting for data to transfer over networks.