With the price of SSD shooting up, cloud drives have emerged as soul savior. Besides saving you from the purchasing expensive hard drives for storing data, cloud storage also allows you to get rid of the hassle of juggling different hard drives. There is no need to preach it. If you work with data, a large amount of data, you must know that cloud drives are crucial these days.
However, Apple doesn’t think the same which is why Mac devices do not integrate with cloud drives as smoothly as they do for iCloud. If you too find it troublesome to visit the web app of drives like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive to upload or download a file to your MacBook, here is a tool to make your life easier.
CloudMounter, as evident from its name, mounts cloud drives on your MacBook so that you can easily drag and drop the files as you would do with the files stored on the integrated drives.
Mount and encrypt cloud drives easily
CloudMounter is a software by Eltima that not only allows you to mount your cloud drives on your Mac but also encrypts them to add an external layer of security. CloudMounter supports the following cloud drives:
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- Amazon S3
- Microsoft OneDrive
- (S)FTP
- WebDAV
- Open Stack Swift Servers
- Backblaze B2
- Box cloud
Once you have installed the software in your MacOS device, you need to log into your cloud storage as you would do on the web app. Then, the cloud drives will appear as a volume with a colorful icon on your desktop. You can simply drag and drop files as you do with files stored on your internal storage.
Apart from the mentioned cloud storage drives, Eltima is pushing hard to add more and more cloud services to ensure that software caters to a wide audience having accounts on different cloud storage. Moreover, you need to purchase a one-time license of the software, there is no need to worry about the updates as you are entitled to receive all the future additions if you have purchased the software.
Setting up all the accounts hardly takes a few minutes and if you have an account on Microsoft OneDrive, you will be impressed that CloudMounter uses the same interface as the web app itself. CloudMounter also supports two-factor authentication so there is no compromise on security.
After mounting the cloud drives on your Mac devices, dragging and dropping files it seamless. However, the speed with which the files are made available on your device depends entirely on the speed of your internet connection.
Eltima has worked hard to make sure that the software is user-friendly. There are different icons displayed adjacent to files to show you whether the files are uploading, downloading or the upload/download has failed.
Finder- friendly software
One of the reasons why we recommend CloudMounter software is its tight integration with the Finder. Once you have mounted the cloud drives, the drives appear in the Finder sidebar as your regular internal drives appear.
There is no need to manually add the drives as the drives are automatically mounted. This makes it easy for users to use different drives without going through the hassle of adding them to the Finder.
The Finder-friendly software is a necessity if you have accounts on multiple cloud storage drives.
Encrypt Cloud Drives For Added Security
Another striking feature of CloudMounter is its encryption capabilities. The software can encrypt all the files stored on your cloud storage account (except for the Google files as they have their own proprietary format which makes it impossible to encrypt). Once you have encrypted the files, anyone using the same copy of CloudMounter as you are using will see the encrypted versions of the files even if he/she is using a web app to sign-in into the cloud storage drives.
However, the feature comes with a caveat that you cannot encrypt individual files or folders. If you want cloud encryption, you need to encrypt whole drives and directories. To encrypt cloud drives, simply right click on any drive and select the “Encrypt” from it. Next step is to choose a password and then your files will be encrypted within a matter of a few seconds.
You will be pleased to know that CloudMounter uses 256-bit encryption mechanism which is military grade encryption used by many VPNs and other secure services. The time duration is taken to encrypt your data depends upon the volume of it. If you are planning to encrypt or decrypt a large chunk of data, it might take some minutes.
Regarding adding passwords for encryption, CloudMounter allows you to add the password to Keychain. However, you cannot use the Apple Keychain to recover password from within the CloudMounter app. You need to manually search for it in the Apple Keychain.
During the testing, it was found that CloudMounter’s decryption process is somewhat buggy and you could come across some issues while decrypting files. If your files are not getting decrypted, you can kill the software and try it again.
Pricing of CloudMounter
Although CloudMounter basic version is free to use, if you are interested in the idea of mounting multiple cloud drives on your device and further encrypt them, then the software will cost you $44.99 per license for 1 Mac, including a Lifetime Upgrades Guarantee. With that being said, there is a free trial of 14-days available if you want to try out the capabilities of the software. The free version allows you to integrate only one Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive account.
Pros
- Finder-friendly software
- Supports a wide range of cloud drives and FTP/SFTP clients
- Easy to set up and use
- Uses 256-bit encryption for encrypting cloud drives
- Sidebar icons for easy accessibility
Cons
- No support for SMB servers
- No support for Amazon Cloud Drive
- Multiple cloud connections are paid
Conclusion
CloudMounter is a great software for those who juggle between different cloud storage and often need to upload/download files. Its compatibility with multiple cloud storage providers is an added benefit. Moreover, the seamless and intuitive interface makes the software slick and easy to use.
Encryption could be another reason why you should purchase this software. If you can look past certain bumps like connection issues and issues with decrypting files, CloudMounter is a great software at the price at which it is available