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.

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.

Disconnect

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

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.

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.

Registration Key

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

Mac App Store

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

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.

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 YES in a Terminal.app window and restart Finder.app using  → Force Quit… → Finder → Relaunch.

Finder.app does not show files prefixed with . on remote volumes

You can workaround this with setting defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES in a Terminal.app window and restart Finder.app using  → Force Quit… → Finder → Relaunch.

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.

In Finder.app, creating a new top level folder in OpenStack Swift will not allow to rename it from untitled folder

Because OpenStack Swift does not allow to rename containers this operation will fail.

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.

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 on the Desktop

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. Mounted volumes are also listed in the Finder.app sidebar in Favorites.

Changes from server not immediately visible

The directory listing in Finder.app or File Explorer may become out of date when another applications is adding, removing or modifying files on the server. You can force File Explorer to refresh the directory listing with F5.

Search in Finder.app

The Spotlight indexer does not work on remote volumes.

Failure saving documents from Microsoft Word & Excel

This is a known issue.

0 byte files on WebDAV server

If you are running an Apache configuration make sure to disable fastcgi and php-fpm. Refer to ​Troubleshooting WebDAV in the ownCloud manual and ​0 byte files.

Installation

Mac

Requires OS X 10.8 or later. No admin privileges for installation 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.

MSI Installer

Download MSI Installer for corporate environments. Requires prior installation of ​Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1.

Interoperability

We maintain a list of known providers that fail to work with Mountain Duck due to interoperability issues.

• OwnCube. Their deployment does not work and we discourage this product. Refer to ​Ticket #688548.
• Bitnami ownCloud. PHP-FPM is enabled by default in virtual machines and Ubuntu-based cloud images but must be disabled for uploads to complete. Refer to ​How to disable PHP-FPM and ​0 byte files on WebDAV server.

Bug Reports

Please write to support@….

Provide logging output

Windows

Attach the file C:\Users\[YOURUSER]\AppData\Roaming\Cyberduck\mountainduck.log.

Mac

Open Console.app, filter for “Mountain Duck” in the upper right search field with system.log selected in the left pane. Then choose File → Save Copy As… to save the log file and attach it to your email reply.