Home storage that stays mounted
Keep photos, media libraries, family backups, and Finder shares available after your Mac sleeps or switches Wi-Fi—and pause reconnecting whenever you need to.
Otter
Keep a paw on Shares for macOS.
Otter quietly watches SMB shares for home users, small businesses, and home labs, reconnecting them after sleep, network changes, VPN reconnects, and unexpected disconnects.
Native, lightweight, and open source. Optimized for macOS Tahoe and compatible with macOS 15 or newer.
Home users
Small business
Home labs
VPN aware
Finder credentials
Set it once. Let Otter keep watch.
Built for the small macOS moments that break shared storage: sleep, wake, Wi-Fi hops, VPN timing, and slow NAS or server wakeups.
Office shares without babysitting
Use per-share rules, actionable notifications, Shortcuts, and redacted diagnostics so business folders reconnect only where they should.
Home lab friendly
Discover SMB servers, wake sleeping hardware, retry slow mounts, and safely detect unresponsive NAS volumes without force-unmounting them.
Otter vs Launch Agent
A Launch Agent can mount a simple share at login, but keeping SMB shares reliable on a Mac usually means handling sleep, wake, Wi-Fi changes, VPN timing, server reachability, and useful status. Otter wraps that work in a native app instead of a pile of scripts.
Otter
- ✓ Setup Add mounted Finder shares from a native UI
- ✓ Difficulty Simple to set up, adjust, and understand later
- ✓ Recovery Reconnects after sleep, wake, and network changes
- ✓ Conditions Per-share Wi-Fi, VPN, reachability, and Wake-on-LAN rules
- ✓ Status See connected, checking, and waiting shares at a glance
- ✓ Credentials Checks Keychain for saved share passwords
Launch Agent
- ✗ Setup Requires plist and script maintenance
- ✗ Difficulty Harder to set up, debug, and safely change later
- ✗ Recovery Sleep, VPN, and network changes need custom logic
- ✗ Conditions VPN, Wi-Fi, reachability, and wake rules need scripting
- ✗ Status Debugging usually means Console or Terminal
- ✗ Credentials Does not check saved credentials for you
Ready to keep your shares close.
Free, open source, and built for the Macs that rely on home storage, office shares, and home lab servers. Download the latest release when it is available.
Get Otter