Cyberduck Help / Howto / Mountain Duck

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

​Mountain Duck lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS 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.

Installation

Refer to our installation instructions.

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

Find the mounted volume in Finder. Choose Go → Computer or choose Finder → General → Show these items on the desktop: Connected servers to make it appear on your desktop.

Windows

Right click on the task bar and select Taskbar settings → Notification area → Select which icons appear on the taskbar. Make sure Mountain Duck is selected in the list.

Bookmarks

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

Share Bookmarks with Cyberduck

Bookmarks are shared between Cyberduck and Mountain Duck.

Connect Mode

• Online. Do not synchronize any files to your computer. You can only access this volume when a connection is possible to the server or cloud storage. Files are accessed on demand from the remote when opened and do not take up any local disk space.
• Smart Synchronization. Files opened are made available for later offline access. You can explicitly make files available offline using the context menu.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disconnect

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

• On macOS, choose File → Eject in Finder.app 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.

Disconnect using command line

You can unmount volumes using your CLI with umount <bookmark nickname> (Terminal.app) and net use <drive letter>: /delete (cmd.exe) respectively.

Copying Files

Drag files in Finder.app or Windows File Explorer to move and copy files. You can also access the mounted volume with any other application and command line interface.

macOS

Windows

Notifications

Notifications of the connection status are posted to the Notification Center of the operating system.

• Filesystem mounted

• Filesystem unmounted
• Errors
• Sync Notifications

Smart Synchronisation

The smart sync feature allows to make files available offline. Read more.

File History

Recently changed files and pending file transfers. Read more.

Client-side Encryption

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

File Locking

Support for locking files to prevent conflicting edits from others while a document is open in a editor. Read more.

File Versioning

You can preview and revert previous versions of files in a versioned bucket in Amazon S3. Read more.

Integration in Finder and Windows File Explorer

Sync Options

Sync Options to keep file offline or delete from local disk.

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.

Share

Right click files on a mounted drive will open a menu with items to copy & open HTTP URLs or create share links of files. This will include the Origin URL, HTTP URLs and temporary signed URLs in S3. Read more.

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.

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

Refer to Preferences.

Known Issues & Workarounds

Refer to Known Issues.