Best Windows WebDAV Clients: Which One is Right for You? (Top Choices Compared)

Okay, so I was messing around with WebDAV on Windows today, and I thought I’d share my experience. It wasn’t as straightforward as I hoped, but I got it working in the end, and it’s pretty cool.

First, I enabled the WebClient service in Windows Services. You know, just went to the Services app, found WebClient, and set it to start automatically. I thought this would be enough, but boy, was I wrong!

Then I tried to map a network drive to my WebDAV server. I put in the address, clicked “Finish”, and… nothing. It just wouldn’t connect. I was like, “What the heck?”. I double-checked the server address, made sure the WebDAV server was running, everything seemed fine on that end.

So, I hit up Google, started digging around. Turns out, Windows has some weird quirks with WebDAV. There’s this thing called the “Basic Authentication Level” in the registry that needs to be tweaked. Apparently, by default, Windows only likes to connect to WebDAV servers using SSL. My server wasn’t set up with SSL at the time, so that was a no-go.

I had to open up the Registry Editor (regedit) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesWebClientParameters. There, I found the BasicAuthLevel key and changed its value from 1 to 2. This basically tells Windows, “Hey, it’s okay to connect to WebDAV servers without SSL.”

• Open Registry Editor (regedit).
• Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesWebClientParameters.
• Change BasicAuthLevel from 1 to 2.

After that, I restarted the WebClient service, and tried mapping the drive again. Still nothing! I was getting pretty frustrated at this point. I started wondering if I needed to mess with some of these free WebDAV client applications, and read a lot about these free WebDAV clients. One mentions is that the limitation can be lifted in the Windows Registry and the maximum value of 4 GB permitted for WebDAV can be set. After reading this, I thought it might be a file size issue.

Then I stumbled upon another registry setting: FileSizeLimitInBytes. This one controls the maximum file size that Windows will handle over WebDAV. By default, it’s set to something ridiculously low, like 50MB. I was trying to work with larger files, so that was another roadblock.

Back in the registry, I changed the FileSizeLimitInBytes value to 4294967295 which is the maximum value of 4GB, in decimal. I rebooted my computer, just to be safe.

Finally, I tried mapping the drive one more time, and bam! It worked! I could see all my files on the WebDAV server, just like a regular network drive. I could open them, edit them, save them back to the server, everything. It was a great feeling.

So yeah, it took a bit of registry hacking and a few restarts, but I finally got WebDAV working on Windows. It’s a pretty handy way to access files remotely, especially if you don’t want to mess around with setting up a 加速器 or anything like that. Just remember to be careful when editing the registry, you don’t want to accidentally break something!