Color me something of a junkie for cloud services. I’ve tried more than my fair share, and keep the ones that work; especially those with free storage.
Most of the cloud services have their own apps to backup, upload, or download files on your Mac, but that gets messy with many different apps, different configurations, and not all of them integrate well into the Mac’s Finder. There’s a better way.
Finder, Meet Convenience
Apple embeds iCloud Drive into the Mac’s Finder so dragging and dropping files and folders works well enough. The Mac Dropbox app also integrates into the Finder. FTP, sFTP, WebDAV, and others– including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google don’t work as well as iCloud because they don’t integrate well into the Finder.
Here’s how to do it. It’s a Mac app called CloudMounter. The name is appropriate. It mounts cloud storage services into the Finder for easier access.
From the Mac’s Menubar you’ll be able to see which online cloud services are connected to your Mac. There are plenty out there, and CloudMounter has the ones that matter.
- FTP – the standard of internet file transfer protocols
- sFTP – SSH connections for greater security
- WebDAV – an easier way to upload
- Dropbox – it’s hard to ignore how well this works
- Amazon S3 – inexpensive online backup and storage
- Google Drive – when will we stop using ‘drive’
- Microsoft OneDrive – because they copy everything
What about iCloud? It’s already integrated into your Mac via iCloud Drive and the Finder.
CloudMounter takes a few minutes to setup to use, though, as you’ll need to enter in each of your cloud service account information.
In the end, what you get in CloudMounter is a single source that manages each cloud connection. For example, using FTP or sFTP is much like transferring files from one folder to another, except that one folder is on a remote service.
Amazon S3 is treated like a removable disk in the Finder so you can use it to drop or download files from specific buckets. It even works with all Amazon AWS regions; U.S., Asia, Europe.
Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive work much the same way. Enter the account information, and CloudMounter handles the connection. Can you do exactly the same thing with each cloud service’s own application on your Mac? Kinda sorta. What CloudMounter does is keep management all together in one app, so connecting and disconnecting is easier and faster, and Finder integration is a huge plus.
There is a try-before-you-buy option so you can determine how CloudMounter fits into your work flow. The app’s developer publishes a number of Mac apps including a few favorites; Encrypto (free encryption utility), the Elmedia media player, and the Commander One Finder replacement app.
