Windows 8 Bible

UNC Paths

Before diving too deep into methods for accessing network resources, let’s take some time to delve into a topic that will help you navigate network resources more easily — UNC paths.

UNC stands for Universal Naming Convention. A UNC path is expressed in the form:

\\MachineName\PathName

MachineName is the name of the computer and PathName is a folder path on that computer. For example, assume that your network includes a computer named SNOOPY that you use as a file server. On that computer is a folder that you have shared as SharedDocs. Within that SharedDocs folder is a subfolder named Contracts. The UNC path to the Contracts folder would be \\SNOOPY\SharedDocs\Contracts. Note that the UNC path is not case-sensitive.

A UNC path makes it easy to navigate the network, particularly when you know the path name already. Using a UNC path is often quicker than navigating to the Network folder, and then to a remote computer, and drilling down through its shared folders. Instead, you can open the Computer folder, click in the Address bar, and simply type the UNC path to the remote share that you want to use.

Another point to understand is that you can specify the IP address of the remote computer in place of the computer name in the UNC path. So, assuming that our trusty computer named SNOOPY has the IP address 192.168.0.5, the UNC path to the Contracts folder would be \\192.168.0.5\SharedDocs\Contracts.

Now that you’re up to speed on UNC paths, let’s take a look at how to access ...