Blog Updates, tips and behind-the-scenes from the team

Work Offline with Smart Synchronization

Version 3 adds a smart synchronization feature to add offline support. Files are synchronized to the local disk when opened to allow offline usage and changes are uploaded in the background as soon as a connection is available. Dropbox like experience with your preferred on-premise enterprise storage or cloud storage. With the additional option to choose which files and folders are available for offline use. Other files are visible but only stored as placeholders. These do not take up disk space on the computer and are downloaded on demand only.

Edit files Offline and upload changes when connectivity to remote server is restored.

Badge Icons

Badge icons in the Finder and Windows Explorer indicate the sync status of files – easily assess if the file is only available when online or is synced to your computer for offline editing. Synchronization with the remote storage is paused and resumed automatically depending on your network connection. The application icon in the system tray animates when a background transfer is currently in progress.

Upgrade

Mountain Duck 3 is a paid upgrade. Existing customers get an upgrade discount between 40% and 100% depending on the date of purchase. Please upgrade your license before updating.

Update. Cyberduck 7.0.1 and Mountain Duck 3.0.3 now include a connection profile for Nextcloud & ownCloud by default allowing a more straightforward setup. You can now also select files to create a public share link.

You are looking for a way to connect to your NextCloud or OwnCloud server without loosing any hard disk space on your computer? Mountain Duck mounts your server storage as a network drive in which you can transfer and edit files. The following describes the connection process to NextCloud with a Mountain Duck Bookmark step-by-step.

• Connect to your NextCloud or OwnCloud instance in your web browser and log in.
• Click on the option Settings in the lower left of the screen and copy the displayed WebDAV address.

• Start Mountain Duck, click on the icon in the tray area or status bar and choose the option New Bookmark.
• Paste the previous copied WebDAV address into the server field and press tab. After that, the bookmark should have chosen WebDAV (HTTPS) on its own and should have split the WebDAV address into two parts – the server address and the default path.

• Type your Username into the corresponding field and press Connect.

• Enter your password in the login prompt displayed and choose Login.

• The login and connection process opens automatically a Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows) window with the network drive selected – ready to use.

See also Mountain Duck 3 as an alternative to the Dropbox client application.

Mountain Duck 3, combined with any cloud storage, is a viable, more secure solution to synchronize access to documents on multiple computers and users. With Mountain Duck 3 you have the ability to make files and folders accessible for offline usage selectively. This has the advantage that not all data is kept on your local drive for offline usage compared to clients like Dropbox and Google Drive. Additionally, you can apply this principle to all of your bookmarks and not only on the already mentioned cloud storage provider.

Keep files selectively offline

• Open Mountain Duck and connect to the desired Bookmark (We’ll use Dropbox in our example).
• Navigate to the file or folder that you want to keep on the disk for offline usage.
• Right-click on the desired file or folder and choose Sync Options → Keep Offline on Local Disk in the context menu. If you are using macOS you have to activate the Finder Extension in order to reach the described option.

• Wait until the file is successfully synchronized. The chosen file or folder should show the following badge icon.

Now you can access the file when you aren’t connected to the Internet. All file changes will be synchronised as soon as connectivity to the remote storage is restored.

Connect to multiple accounts

You can mount multiple accounts at the same time if you have different Dropbox accounts. Create a new bookmark for every account and run through the OAuth flow. Make sure to log out of the Dropbox website prior setting up a new bookmark.

See also Access NextCloud from your desktop.

You want to grant one or several people temporary access to large files? Email is not an option and providers offering a web interface are costly, limit the file size or tend to be unreliable. Cyberduck or Mountain Duck in combination with cloud storage providers allows you to share files without relying on a third-party website.

Auto Expiring Links

With Cyberduck or Mountain Duck and those cloud storage providers, you can share links with third parties that expire after an hour, days or months. Between the protocols, the expiration time of the shared links may vary. Contrary to other solutions there is no restrictions on bandwidth or the number of downloads.

Supported Providers

In the following section, you will find a short guide on how to share large files with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox or OpenStack Swift cloud storage providers.

Step by Step

• Open Cyberduck or Mountain Duck and connect to your Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox or OpenStack Swift bookmark.
• Navigate to or upload the file you want to share
• Right-click on the file, choose the option Copy URL in the context menu and click on the Pre-Signed URL (within Dropbox it is named Temporary URL) with the wanted expiration time. In Cyberduck the same option is available in Edit → Copy URL→ Signed URL. Share the link with anyone you want to give access to.

Update See also our documentation on sharing options for different storage service providers.

The number of different possible options for cloud storage provided by services available from Microsoft Office 365 is confusing and merits some further ado. There are two services available from Microsoft – OneDrive and SharePoint – which are hidden in a diversity of different packages. SharePoint is a cloud storage service which is only integrated in business packages while OneDrive is existing for personal and business usages. Every person who has a Microsoft Account does have access to the personal version of OneDrive. You can detect if you have a personal or business profile by looking at the email address. If you have a business profile the email address contains onmicrosoft.com.

In the following chart an overview of the most common business profile packages and whether the packages contain OneDrive, SharePoint or both is shown.

[TABLE]

Cyberduck and Mountain Duck support OneDrive in personal and business edition as well as SharePoint through the default bundled connection profiles Microsoft OneDrive and Microsoft SharePoint. It doesn’t make any difference if you are using OneDrive personal or business there is only one profile that works for both. To connect to OneDrive or SharePoint with Cyberduck or Mountain Duck you have to create a corresponding bookmark which will connect to the services via Microsoft Graph.

Connecting to OneDrive Personal and Business

• Click on “New Bookmark” if you are using Mountain Duck or on the “+” symbol in the browser window if you are using Cyberduck to create a new bookmark.
• Choose the profile Microsoft OneDrive.
• Type in the Username field your account email address and connect to the bookmark.

• A window appears and prompts for an authentication code. Alongside with the authentication code prompt, a web browser window should open with the login page of Microsoft. Log into your account in the web browser window and copy the afterward appearing authentication code into the field in the authentication prompt window.

• If you are using Cyberduck a browser window will appear. If you are using Mountain Duck Windows Explorer or Finder are opened revealing your OneDrive.

Connecting to SharePoint

• Click on “New Bookmark” if you using Mountain Duck or on the “+” symbol in the browser window if you using Cyberduck to create a new bookmark.
• Choose the previously installed profile ​Microsoft Sharepoint Document Library or the bundled profile Microsoft SharePoint.
• Log in with your *.onmicrosoft.com account to login.microsoftonline.com to connect to your SharePoint document library. If you want to connect to SharePoint online you have to use your OneDrive personal account.

More information can be found in the Help Wiki for both OneDrive and Sharepoint.