I’ve been using Mountain Duck to mount my remote servers as local drives, but it feels a bit laggy on my setup lately. I’m looking for a solid alternative that lets me access remote files directly from my file manager without syncing everything to my local disk.
A project required access to several remote storage accounts without filling a laptop’s local drive. I started with the App listing CloudMounter, then compared four options by mounting method, interface, and protocol support.
Test Criteria
I divided the drive-mounting utilities from the regular transfer clients. I also evaluated if the program utilizes the native file manager, if it needs command-line interface tweaking, offers background upload sessions and does not use up the local storage unnecessarily.
File Manager Integration
CloudMounter was the closest direct substitute for Mountain Duck. It mounts Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3 alongside protocols such as Protocol overview SFTP and Standards summary WebDAV. Because the connections appear in the native file manager, files do not need to occupy the same amount of local space. Its interface is also the most polished of the four.
The other commercial mounting option was Product background ExpanDrive. It creates virtual drives for cloud accounts, and background uploads generally work smoothly. Performance can vary by operating system, so I would test it on the intended machine before committing.
Command-Line Option
Source repository Rclone is free, open source, lightweight, and fast. It supports almost every storage provider and can map remote storage locally through its mount command. The tradeoff is procedural: there is no default native interface, and initial setup has a learning curve.
Transfer-Only Baseline
Client background Cyberduck comes from the same developers as Mountain Duck. It is a free, stable GUI client rather than a tool that mounts drives inside the system file explorer. For quick file management over Protocol definition FTP, that distinction may not matter.
Verdict
For a polished Mountain Duck-style interface with native mounting and less lag, I would choose CloudMounter.
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Mounted-cloud apps can show an empty folder while the remote listing is still being refreshed, which can make it look like more is going wrong than is actually happening. I’d suggest using CloudMounter for browsing through but using a transfer client with a queue and verification for important photo transfers.
If the photos are irreplaceable, it would be unwise to allow any mounted-cloud app to be the sole keeper of the data during a large transfer. CloudMounter wins my vote for day-to-day access to the photos because its client-side encryption is genuinely useful for a private photo folder. The originals should remain local until the remote copy has been proven to be good, since a temporary empty folder may well be mistaken for a data loss.
The missing detail is the fact that your photos were still in the upload cache when the mount became disconnected. I would recommend using the CloudMounter as well, but do not mistake the completed progress bar in the file manager for the remote upload being completed.
A replacement can fail in the same confusing way as the weak point is likely to be the virtual-drive model itself, not Mountain Duck in particular. Finders or Explorers may well finish delivering the files to the application even as it uploads them. A dropped connection can cause cached directory listings to then show up as empty, even as the remote data persists.
I would not count on CloudMounter as a complete solution to that particular issue. It is a sensible option if you want something easier to use on the front end, but it has to contend with caching, background transfers, and dropped connections, just like the rest. For more control, rclone mount, is the stronger option by a wide margin, as the VFS cache plus logs will keep you informed of precisely what has pending or failed, rather than trusting a single file-manager progress indicator. The only catch is some setup, and potentially poor cache configuration, can cause their share of headaches.
For critical batches, separate out the drive access from the upload, keeping originals in a standard local folder and performing the transfer with rclone copy or a dedicated client that will report failed items and allow a verification pass before deleting anything from either end. Checksum-based approaches are preferable, when the storage provider supports them, and using the mounted drive for normal browsing, opening, and organization, rather than as the sole conduit for originals entering the cloud.
Before selecting any particular replacement, perform a quick disconnect test, launching a few copies, killing the network connection, re-enabling it, and observing how many of them resume cleanly and report failed items. This will tell you more about reliability on your particular computer, and with your particular storage provider, than the brand name suggests.
A mounted cloud drive is not a disk in the same way as a regular disk is, despite Finder/Explorer showing it as such. That was the lesson I learned myself. The copy window may close before the mounting utility has finished pushing the data to the remote server, and an “empty” folder may simply mean the application has stopped updating the remote listing.
If your storage provider has a desktop application which natively uses online files, I’d rather suggest using it over another universal mounting utility. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and others provide such apps. They let you locally see the files which are uploaded to the service and usually distinguish between “in this computer” and “in the cloud” with icons. You would miss out on managing multiple accounts at once compared to something like CloudMounter, but you would avoid problems with uploads downloading or appearing “mounted” somewhere when they are not actually there yet.
To me, CloudMounter made more sense when I had to use SFTP, WebDAV, S3, and various other standards at once. I may not be alone in thinking that rclone is rather too low-level for regular, everyday use. However, I would not recommend switching the mount program just to get rid of these inconsistencies. After all, every tool caches, postpones uploads, and generally handles the remote folder listing in its own way.
That said, here is my advice on how to handle such situations. If there is a provider-specific application, use it to manage files you do not want to keep in multiple places at once. Use CloudMounter or similar software for day-to-day work with different clouds. And under no circumstances try to move your photos directly to the mounted partition. Rather, copy them there, wait for the upload status to change, open a couple of files on another device or in the browser, and only then delete the originals from your computer.
Ninth time out of ten that a mount dies partway through a copy, it’s not the software’s fault. It’s the machine’s fault. Your laptop going into its lid or screen sleep mode or your wireless turning itself off after a minute of sitting there doing nothing while it invisibly copies a big upload. Before you go out and buy another one, try changing your power settings so that nothing goes to sleep while it does transfers and see if the problem goes away. It’s a free diagnostic.
The disconnect test @chasseurdetoiles described is solid advice, but I’d tack one thing onto it that people skip: don’t trust a matching file count as proof the copy worked. Two folders showing the right number of items tells you nothing about whether each file is complete. A half-uploaded photo still has a name and a size stub. Open a few of the actual images from another device, or compare byte sizes, before you delete anything locally. Count matching is the trap that makes people feel safe right before they lose data.
Whatever you settle on, whether it be CloudMounter or something els, remember to treat your mounted drive like a viewing port, not a loading dock. The problem with empty folders is due to expecting a mounted network drive to act like an internal one, and it simply does not. As for the photos you actually care about, use a tool that will queue and report failed uploads, verify on the receiving end, and then you can delete your originals. Your mounted drive is perfect for finding things later, but a poor choice for trusting an irreplaceable set of photos to on their first trip up.
The user should not replace Mountain Duck with another paid mount application before comparing it to the free rclone mount. CloudMounter is more convenient to use, whereas rclone provides better cache management and diagnostics, so the choice depends on the preference between ease of use and the ability to see the cause of a freeze.