Windows WebDAV tray watcher + watchdog (PowerShell 5.1 + WinForms)
Map your Nextcloud to a real Windows drive letter and keep it healthy. NcDavTray is a small self-contained tray application: no runtime, nothing installed system-wide, and no administrator rights for its normal work. It runs installed or portable, and it holds as many mounts as you have drive letters — Nextcloud accounts and public share links side by side.
📖 The documentation lives in the wiki. This page is the short version.
- Any number of mounts in one tray application — Nextcloud accounts and public
/s/…share links, mixed freely. Share links need no account of your own, so a Nextcloud of your own is not required at all - Watchdog and auto-reconnect — server offline or in maintenance, the drive is unmapped cleanly and remounted as soon as it is back
- A real network drive, not a sync folder — applications read and write on the server itself, which is what lets Office issue WebDAV locks against it. See File locking
- Subfolder mapping, custom Explorer label and an icon taken from your Nextcloud favicon
- Two security models — DPAPI when installed, AES-256-CBC with PBKDF2 when portable
- WebClient tuning and a WebDAV cache view for the Windows redirector behind it all
- Seven languages, switched live without a restart
- Optional update check, off by default. No telemetry, no analytics, no third-party calls
- Windows PowerShell 5.1 — present on Windows 10 and 11. On Windows Server the WebDAV Redirector feature has to be added first
- The WebClient service, set to Manual or Automatic
- Something to mount over HTTPS: a Nextcloud account with an app password, or nothing more than a public share link somebody sent you
- Download the ZIP from Releases and unpack it inside your user profile.
- Run
Installer.cmdand pick 1 (installed) or 2 (portable). - Right-click the tray icon → Add account… or Add share link… and save. The next free drive letter is already filled in.
Full walkthrough: Installation and Mounts.
⚠️ Planning more than two mounts on one server? Windows keeps one login per server identity and allows two identities per host. Read Server identities before you configure them.
| Installation | installed and portable, updating, uninstalling |
| Mounts | the mount list, drive letters, subfolders, status vocabulary |
| Share links | public links as a drive, and what to do when one refuses |
| Server identities | the Windows two-login limit and error 1219 |
| The tray | icons, shapes, colours and every menu entry |
| File locking | why a network drive locks and a sync folder does not, and what files_lock adds |
| WebClient service · WebDAV cache | the Windows redirector: limits, timeouts, cache |
| Security and privacy | where passwords live, which hosts are contacted |
| Languages · Updates | language packs, the update check |
| Build from source | the module tree, make.cmd, the static checks, and how to contribute |
Coming from version 1? See Differences between 1 and 2. The 1.x line ended with v1.2.2 and is documented in the README of that tag.
GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE. The project is REUSE-compliant.
- Author & Maintainer: [ernolf] Raphael Gradenwitz
- Acknowledgements: Windows WebDAV mini-redirector (WebClient), the PowerShell & WinForms ecosystem, and the Nextcloud community.