Consumeroo

ExpanDrive by Travis on March 29th, 2008

ExpanDrive is a lightweight utility that allows you to connect to remote SFTP servers right within Finder. Most of us feel that given OS X’s Unix architecture, this should have been something that OS X did out of the box, unfortunately it does not.

Installation was simple and unobtrusive. I Didn’t even need a restart. Once you’re up and running, connecting to a remote share is pretty straight forward. Enter your connection details:

And you’re off to the races.

There’s a handy “Drive Manager” that you can use to manage and connect to your drives that looks like this:

And also, in version 1.04 the ability to have your drives in the menu-bar drop-down. This I especially like.

The basics of opening a folder, dragging some files over and letting them crawl up to the server work perfectly as advertised. In reverse, downloading a file or folder works just as well too. Some of the benefits of ExpanDrive (taken from Magnetk) are the facts that it:

• Handles reconnecting with grace
• Has a “zero configuration” and just works
• Integrates seamlessly with Finder

These 3 points are practically enough to justify the $29.00 all on its own. One could say this is the holy grail of OS X -> Internet networking we’ve all been waiting for, and it mostly is.

Since I started writing this article, ExpanDrive has been updated twice, and on top of that when I went over to Magnetk’s forums to see why I was getting a certain error (this pesky -36 file copy error), I was politely greeted by Jeff Mancuso (who I believe to be the owner of Magnetk) saying my issues were not unique and it’s their number 1 issue to fix. Some of the issues I have had (which are most of the issues on their forums) are:

• This really annoying -36 file copy error when a disk has been idle
• Files don’t update in Finder very reliably

All in all, I think ExpanDrive is pretty fabulous. However, I think I will let a few more point versions be released before I feel comfortable using this as a true replacement for my current AFP setup. I have no doubt that by 1.05 or 1.06 my main issues will be fixed (which is a true testament to the attitude I am getting from Jeff) and I’ll be able to use ExpanDrive fulltime.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Touch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.