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.

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 4.8 or later) and Mountain Duck. On Mac, make sure to install the the latest ​snapshot build available.

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.

Notifications

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

Registration Key

Mac

You can always reinstall Mountain Duck on any Mac you own from the Mac App Store in  → App Store… → Purchased.

Windows

You can always ​lookup the registration key that is sent to you after buying Mountain Duck for Windows.

Usage Scenarios

Mirror files on remote server with rsync

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.

Known Issues

Finder.app will write .DS_Store files to the remote volume

You can workaround this with setting defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true.

Performance issues in Finder.app rendering preview

We suggest to disable the option View → Show View Options → Show Icon Preview (⌘-J) in Finder.app and choose "Use as Defaults.

Saving a file in TextEdit.app will attempt to create a folder /Temporary Items on the remote volume. On some servers this may fail due to a permission failure or because the name of the folder is not allowed as in S3.

You will get the error message Bucket name is not DNS compatible. Please contact your web hosting service provider for assistance..

Writing files to S3 compatible third party service provider may fail

The S3 interoperable service must support ​multipart uploads.

In Finder.app, creating a new top level folder in S3 fails with Interoperability failure. Bucket name is not DNS compatible. Please contact your web hosting service provider for assistance.

A bucket name in S3 cannot have whitespace in the filename. Because a new folder created with Finder.app is named Untitled Folder the operation fails. As a workaround, create a new bucket with mkdir in Terminal.app.

Cannot choose the region for S3 bucket when creating a new top level folder

Creating a top level folder in S3 or OpenStack Swift will default to the default location for new buckets (us-east-1 for S3) or containers.

Pressing F5 in File Explorer on Windows does not refresh directory listing

You will currently have to reconnect to see remote changes.

Uploading symbolic links on Mac fails with The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “…” can’t be read or written. (Error code -36)

Creating symbolic links is only supported when connected with SFTP.

Multiple OpenStack Swift containers in different regions with the same name

Browsing containers will be erratic. As a workaround, browse a region by using a ​connection profile limited to a single region as with ​Rackspace Cloudfiles region profiles.

Mounted volumes do not appear in the Finder.app sidebar

Navigate to volumes using ⌘⇧-C in a Finder.app window or choose Finder → Preferences… → General → Show these items on the desktop: Connected Servers to make the volume appear on the Desktop.

Installation

Mac

Requires OS X 10.8 or later. No installation of kernel extensions or system libraries is required. Mountain Duck is installed through the Mac App Store in /Applications.

Login Item

You can choose to open Mountain Duck when you login to your computer. Note that the application will not appear in Login Items of the User & Groups system preference pane. The login item is removed, when you quit the application using Quit Mountain Duck.

Windows

Requires Windows 7 or later. Run the Mountain Duck Installer.exe with administrator privilege to install Mountain Duck.