This week’s mac techmail was Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems which takes a look at the ExpanDrive tool, which sits in the menubar and allows you to connect to remote SFTP, SSH, FTP/FTPS, or Amazon S3 file systems and mount them on the computer as if they were local filesystems. It’s essentially a polished front-end for FUSE with sshfs support for the SFTP/SSH connections. It’s a really great tool and while not free, it’s relatively inexpensive and works wonders. With it I can remotely mount the filesystem of my VPS using SSH with keys, or connect to the home filesystem while on the road, etc. And instead of having to navigate the remote filesystem within one application like a traditional FTP client, I can access it using the terminal, Finder, PathFinder, or any other utility that operates on the local filesystem. It securely mounts the remote filesystems to be as available as a SMB or AFP share.