Mountain Duck 5.3.2 for macOS

You get a folder full of raw footage from yesterday's shoot. Instead of downloading the whole thing, you see it right in Finder like a drive on your desk. You drag the clips into your editor and start working.

Mounts cloud storage as a Finder volume

Mountain Duck mounts your storage as a regular volume in Finder. You bookmark a server or cloud service once, and it shows up like any external drive, ready for any application to open files directly.

Will files fill up my hard drive?

Not unless you want them to. Smart Synchronization keeps files online until you open one, then downloads a local copy on demand. You can also mark specific files and folders to stay stored offline on your computer.

Offline edits upload automatically later

You keep working. Any changes you make upload quietly in the background as soon as a connection is available again. You don't have to remember to sync later.

Shares bookmarks with Cyberduck automatically

It sure does. If you have Cyberduck installed, Mountain Duck shares your bookmarks automatically, so you don't set up the same connections twice. Version 5 also brings integrated connect mode for cleaner mounting.

Three remote drives waiting in Finder Monday morning

Monday morning. You grab coffee and open your Mac. Three remote drives are already mounted in Finder — the office SFTP server, your personal Dropbox, and a client's Amazon S3 bucket. They've been sitting there since Friday, quiet as anything.

You open a Photoshop file straight from the S3 bucket. Mountain Duck downloads it in the background while the splash screen fades. You make your edits, hit save, and close the file. The upload happens without a sound. No export step, no browser uploader, no waiting.

A colleague messages you about last week's shared folder on the SFTP server. You navigate there in Finder, right-click a folder, and choose "Keep offline." That folder and everything inside it now lives on your Mac's local disk. You'll have it on the train later, connection or not.

Before lunch you mount a new WebDAV server for a one-off project. You drag the connection string into Mountain Duck's bookmark window, give it a name, and it appears in Finder within seconds. You drag a folder of exported PDFs onto it and go make a sandwich. When you return, the upload is done.

Fix the warning icon with a fresh login

Sometimes a mounted volume appears with a warning icon and won't open. Nine times out of ten, the authentication token has expired. Disconnect the volume from the menu bar icon, open the bookmark, re-enter your password, and reconnect. Works every time.

If you're using an older Mac and Finder feels sluggish with several mounts active, check which volumes have Smart Synchronization set to download full directory structures. Large buckets with thousands of files can slow things down while the index builds. Limit offline caching to folders you actually need.

Got a Cryptomator vault that won't decrypt? Make sure you have the same version of Cryptomator installed that you used to create the vault. Mountain Duck relies on the vault format matching — an update to Cryptomator can sometimes break compatibility until both apps are on the same page.

And if you're scratching your head because Mountain Duck refuses to connect to an SMB share after upgrading to version 5, toggle the SMB protocol version in the bookmark settings. Some older NAS boxes speak only SMB2 and need the connection told explicitly.

Editing weddings straight from Backblaze B2

Lena cuts wedding films and keeps her raw footage on Backblaze B2 because it's cheap and she's never at the same desk two days running. She used to spend Monday mornings downloading proxy files from a browser interface, swearing at zip archives, and re-syncing everything by hand.

Now she mounts her B2 bucket through Mountain Duck on whatever Mac she's using that day. Her project structure — Ceremony, Reception, Drone shots — appears in Finder exactly as she organized it. She opens a 4K clip in DaVinci Resolve straight from the mountain duck mac volume. It streams in, she grades it, and the rendered output saves back to the same folder. The upload ticks away while she moves to the next clip.

At the café with patchy Wi-Fi, she's already marked three key folders as "Keep offline" that morning. The footage is there on disk. She edits uninterrupted, and when the Wi-Fi returns, Mountain Duck pushes her changes to B2 without a prompt. She doesn't think about sync. She thinks about which shot comes next.

Bottom line: it turns cloud storage into a local drive you don't have to babysit.

• macOS 13 or later
• Runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs