Mountain Duck, Expandrive or Cloudmounter

I have used ExpanDrive in the past and found it unreliable.

I’ve used all three. I was using CloudMounter for a while most recently. I ended up switching to just asking my Google clients to share all of their drives with my business google account, and I run two OneDrive accounts, and a Dropbox account. That covers me for 99% of cloud usage and I occasionally log in via a browser if I need another account.

The native apps seem to work more seamlessly with things like MS Excel. E.g. autosave is only available with the OneDrive native apps. They have other issues, sure, but I feel like major bugs are more likely to be addressed quickly when the native apps are used, just because so many other people are also using the same software.

I’ve been using CloudMounter to mount a client’s Dropbox and it has worked well for me. Search isn’t great, compared to the web based dropbox and sync isn’t quite as fast (sometimes I have to log out and log back in), but it’s worked pretty well for me.

I use Mountain Duck. I appreciate the ability to have a direct pointer to a folder in my Google Drive or Dropbox. I like having the folders mount as drives on my desktop. I have correspondingly dropped using Google and Dropbox clients since over a year or more. I cannot therefore comment on whether the newer Google Drive or Dropbox clients are any better or worse.


JJW

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I recently started experimenting with rclone mount.

Too early to give an impression, but maybe somebody else is already using this for a longer time?

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My experience with ExpanDrive is in this thread A Warning about ExpanDrive / SmartSync - Software - MPU Talk (macpowerusers.com)

I’m still rolling my own and it’s fine.

though rclone mount looks interesting.

I’ve used CloudMounter with OneDrive and Box accounts with pretty good success.

I wrote this at the end of a recent blog post concerning cloud sync:

Finally, I can also give some advice on a somewhat related subject. There are a few apps out there which allow you to mount a cloud sync service’s storage as a networked pseudo-drive, rather than sync with files that live on your device’s local storage. The idea is that you can store a lot more stuff than your local storage will allow, since files so stored are only in the cloud. I tried three such apps: CloudMounter, Mountain Duck, and the promising but beta-level-buggy Strongsync. While each has its use case and is geekily interesting, each also has just enough quirks that I’d fear for the safety of my files. (Some of the quirks are just plain annoying, such as how CloudMounter’s and Mountain Duck’s otherwise intriguing encryption features change files’ modification dates. Not cool.) After all, each cloud sync service expects you to use its app, not a third-party app, to deal with whatever you store on the service; guess how little help you’ll get from that service if one of these apps FUBARs your content on the service.

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thank you all, from your feedback , I now have better perspectives on the apps

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This is a good summary of my feelings. “Just enough quirks” is too many quirks when I’m dealing with client files.

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Thanks for the mention of Mountain Duck.
Maestral didn’t work for me, so giving MD a try. So far so good.

Just mounted my DB account through my Uni. Wonder what their bill is per month?

Screen Shot 2022-02-23 at 6.23.00 PM

I just found out that Pathfinder can also connect to S3, Dropbox, etc.

Because I answered on my iPhone and a bit too hastily, I neglected to mention that if I was going to use an app for something like this, it would be Panic’s Transmit. of course.

That app has been around for ages and thoroughly tested over many many years. There isn’t another app that I would be as confident that it would work reliably, and if I did have issues, I could get some support.

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thanks @tjluoma , this looks promising. I’ll look into it

Interesting. Compared to Mountain Duck, I do not see an easy way in Transmit to mount a Shared Google drive. I also prefer the mounting approach in Mountain Duck, providing a menu bar pull down with sub-folders.

Finally, I like how Mountain Duck mounts the cloud storage as a volume icon on the desktop.

mdf@2x


JJW

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For Pathfinder to work with Dropbox it needs to have Dropbox software instled. I use Panic’s Transmit which I can connect to Cloud Storage when needed and then disconnect. No apps need to be installed from Cloud Providers.

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Has anyone used both ForkLift and Transmit?

How do they compare?

(I currently use ForkLift, but it lacks OneDrive support :cry:)

Something to be aware of: Mountain Duck will happily fill your drive with its cache files if you have Enable buffering turned on.
You can find the cache folder here:
/Users/<you>/Library/Group Containers/G69SCX94XU.duck/Library/Application Support/duck/Cache

I turned Enable buffering off, then deleted the files in the Cache folder and got my 250GiB back :slight_smile:

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good to know indeed !!

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Sounds like the start to make a feature request to limit the size for the Cache folder.

Mine is only 20 GB.


JJW

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