Getting Started

A two-minute walkthrough of your first mount.

1. Mount an archive

Drag-and-drop (easiest): drag any supported archive file onto the executable in your file manager. The app starts, logs Drag-and-drop mode: Detected archive file and mounts immediately.

From the app menu: start the app, use Mount (or Mount as Drive / Mount as Folder) and pick an archive file.

From the command line:

SimpleZipDrive.exe "C:\Games\MyGame.zip" M

2. Where it mounts

Windows: with no mount point specified, the app tries the drive letters M, N, O, P, Q in order and uses the first free one the log shows:

Attempting to mount on 'M:'...
Successfully mounted on 'M:'.

If all five letters are taken, an error is logged and you can mount to a folder instead. A bare letter (M) is automatically expanded to M: (Dokan backend: M:\). See Mounting for the full rules.

Linux/macOS: archives mount on a folder. With no mount point specified, a temporary folder under the system temp directory is used; pick any folder explicitly to control the location.

3. Use the mount

Open This PC (Windows) or your file manager (Linux/macOS) the archive is now a drive/folder named after the archive. Files open directly from the archive:

Small files are decompressed once into memory and shared by every reader.
Large files stream straight from the archive (stored ZIP entries, .zar containers, and Xbox disc images) or through the disk cache.
Re-opening a file that is still in the memory cache is effectively instant.

Nothing is written to the archive or the drive the volume is strictly read-only.

4. Unmount

Any of the following:

Press Unmount in the app window,
close the app window (it unmounts cleanly before exiting), or
on Windows, eject the drive from Explorers tray icon; on Linux/macOS, unmount it from the system (fusermount3 -u <folder> / umount <folder>).

Unmounting deletes the sessions temporary disk-cache files automatically.

5. Check the log pane

The windows log pane tells you exactly what happened at every step: archive type detection, entry counts, cache limits, mount attempts, and errors. Full detail is written to a session log file (see Logging) if something does not work, that file is the first thing to look at.

Next steps

Usage Guide mounting to folders, passwords, command-line details
Mount Backends decide between Dokan, WinFsp and FUSE
Troubleshooting when a mount fails

Edit this page on GitHub

This site uses Just the Docs, a documentation theme for Jekyll.