Cyberduck Help / Howto / Mountain Duck

Cyberduck for mounting volumes in the file explorer is available for Mac & Windows.

​Mountain Duck lets you mount any remote FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 & OpenStack Swift server storage as a local disk in the Finder.app on Mac and the File Explorer on Windows. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume. Transfer files using Finder to remote servers, fast.

User Interface

Mountain Duck runs in the status bar (Mac) and taskbar (Windows). When opening the application you can choose to automatically open Mountain Duck when logging in. Re-opening the application will open previously mounted volumes.

macOS

Windows

Bookmarks

Choose New Bookmark… to add a new bookmark or <Bookmark> → Edit Bookmark to change properties.

Share Bookmarks with Cyberduck

Bookmarks are shared between Cyberduck (Version 4.7.3 or later) and Mountain Duck.

Connect

Choose <Bookmark> → Connect to mount the server as a volume in the Finder.app or the File Explorer on Windows. You can connect to multiple servers and have several volumes mounted. All operations on the remote files and folders can then be performed like on local files.

Mount Location

Volumes are mounted in a shared group container in your user library folder. You can navigate to the volume from the shortcut listed in the Finder.app sidebar in Favorites. To navigate there from Terminal.app you might want to create a symbolic link in your home folder with ln -s ~/Library/Group\ Containers/G69SCX94XU.duck/Library/Application\ Support/duck/Volumes/ ~/Volumes.

Tip. You can just select the menu item with the bookmark name to connect, too. If you are already connected, selecting the menu item will reveal the volume in Finder.app.

Mount as read-only volume

Select Mount Options: Read Only in the bookmark to mount the volume as read-only and disallow any write operations on the remote disk.

Reconnect after restarting computer

If you choose Enable Login Item and Save Workspace in Preferences → General and do not manually eject the volume prior reboot it will reconnect after login.

Disconnect

Choose <Bookmark> → Connect to unmount a volume. Alternatively eject the volume in Finder.app or File Explorer.

• On macOS, choose with File → Eject for the selected volume or control click to choose Eject.
• On Windows, in File Explorer in "This PC" view or the sidebar on the left of the File Explorer window, open the context menu for your mounted drive and select Disconnect.

Copying Files

Use the native features of the file explorer to move and copy files.

Notifications

Notifications of the connection status are posted to the Notification Center of the operating system. You can disable notification in System Preferences → Notifications on macOS and in Settings → Notifications and Actions on Windows.

Failures

If there is a network connectivity issue while the remote server is mounted, an alert is displayed that allows you to retry the connection or disconnect and unmount the volume.

Smart Synchronisation

The smart sync feature allows to make files available offline. Preliminary information for upcoming Mountain Duck 3. You can update to the public beta by switching to Beta in the Update tab in Preferences. Read more.

Client-side Encryption

Support for client side encryption with ​Cryptomator interoperable vaults. Read more.

Finder Extension & Windows File Explorer Extension

macOS

Requires macOS 10.11 or later.

Enable the Mountain Duck Finder Extension in System Preferences → Extensions → Finder by selecting the checkbox. This will enable

• Context menu items for files selected on a mounted volume with options to Reload the folder listing and copy & open URLs of files.
• Badges on file icons to display sync status when _Smart Synchronization_ is enabled for the bookmark.

Reload

Changes from server not immediately visible. The directory listing in Finder.app may become out of date when another applications is adding, removing or modifying files on the server. Choose Reload in Finder from the bookmark menu item or Reload from the ​Finder Extension menu. On Windows, you can force File Explorer to refresh the directory listing with F5.

Copy & Open URLs of Files

Right click files on a mounted drive will open a menu with items to copy & open URLs of files. This will include the Origin URL, ​HTTP URLs, ​CDN and temporary URLs if available.

Add Bookmark

Right click to add a bookmark for the selected path.

Open in Terminal

Right click on a folder and choose Open in Terminal to open a SSH connection to the server in Terminal for SFTP bookmarks. This feature is not supported in the version available in the Mac App Store.

Info Panel

Right click on a file and choose Info to change permissions, ACLs, metadata and other service provider specific settings on a file. Refer to ​Info Window.

Performance Considerations

To reduce the number of requests to the remote server for mounted volumes, we recommend the following settings.

Finder.app

• Enable View → Show Status Bar (⌘-/)
• Choose View → Hide Preview (⌘⇧-P)
• Disable View → Show View Options → Show icon preview
• Finder → Preferences… → General → Show these items on the desktop: Connected servers

Windows Explorer

Choose File Explorer → Folder Options.

• Check Always show icons, never thumbnails
• Check Display File Icon on thumbnails
• Uncheck Show preview handlers in preview pane

Login Item

You will be prompted if Mountain Duck would be opened when logging in to your computer. If you have chosen Don't ask again but want to add Mountain Duck as a login item later, reset the preference with defaults delete io.mountainduck loginitem.enable in a Terminal.app window.

Usage Scenarios

Mirror files to remote server or cloud storage with rsync

Use rsync or any other of your preferred tools to mirror files for example to an S3 bucket. Set the --timeout=TIME option in rsync (in seconds) if you have a low bandwidth or high latency connection.

Open remote files in text editor

Sublime Text and other editors allow you to open folders to work on multiple files.

Create ZIP archive of files on FTP server or cloud storage

Use your preferred archive utility to create a compressed archive of files already stored on the server.

Preferences

Updates

An auto update feature will alert you when a new version is available and self update the application. Choose Preferences → Update → Automatically check for updates. You can also choose to update to snapshot or beta builds.

• Snapshot builds include the latest changes and are published continuously. These builds are not manually tested.
• Beta builds are published before a release and include the latest features and have been tested but might not have release quality yet.

Windows

You recive no update notification if your user is missing adminstrator permission.

Mount Location

macOS

Volumes are mounted in the Volumes folder is in the application support directory. You can change the default to another folder that is writable. Note: You cannot set it to /Volumes on macOS Mojave (10.14 or later) where the directory is not writable.

Known Issues & Workarounds

Refer to Known Issues.

Third Party Documentation

• ​How to use Mountain Duck with Minio