GeekFinder: ExpanDrive, your SFTP filesystem
A week or two ago I came across Gruber’s review of ExpanDrive and their most recent version. This badboy of an app lets your Mac OS X machine mount sftp servers as filesystems giving you, effectively, local access to those files. I had seen this before but the previous version left those .DS_Store files all over the place which was pretty much a deal killer for me - so I was excited to read that in this new version they took care of that and they’ve since come out with version 1.04 with all sorts of fixes and tweaks.
So I DL’d the badboy and gave it shot. The short? It pretty much works just as advertised, easy to setup and configure, dead simple to use. You just add your sftp info into the little admin screen which hides up in the upper right hand corner of your menu bar (near the date/time) and it handles the rest. They show up as drives on your desktop and as expected show up in /Volumes - you can name them whatever you want using the admin screen and easily access them using Terminal.
It’s really smooth and quick. It handles the loss of connectivity well - I tried one over a VPN connection and when I shut down the VPN and then started it up again it quickly reestablished itself. If you try and access it while it’s down you get a little cannot be reached error, but everything starts working aces again once the connection is reestablished.
I thought I’d be using it all the time, in my head. But honestly, I don’t really use it too much. I think mostly that’s because I use that most awesome of editors Vim so I usually am happiest editing on the remote server. It’s marginally more convenient there because paths are all /xyz whereas using ExpanDrive I’d have to start typing in /Volumes/server/xyz. You know, I’m all about saving some typing. It will be interesting, though, if I ever feel like I want split windows from files across servers, that will be really sweet. If you use BBEdit, Photoshop or some other local apps on files I can definitely see this as a nice big win. It’s also convenient, if probably not necessarily the most efficient, to move files from one system to the other if you’re being choosy or moving a file here and a file there.
All in all it’s quite worthwhile, I’m still experimenting with how I’ll use it, but I suspect that it’ll easily be worth the $29 they’re charging for it when my trial period expires. Have you been looking into something like this? Using it already?
