NAS Drive mounts the Nextcloud on your own NAS as a real macOS location — even when it sits behind Cloudflare Access or an SSO proxy. It clears the gateway in your own browser, keeps the Nextcloud sign-in isolated in its own, then gets out of the way. No second app. No second copy of your data anywhere.
You already run Nextcloud on a NAS. Three things usually stand between that and using it like an ordinary drive.
Your own files sit behind a login page. Opening a document means finding the tab, then downloading, then remembering to upload it back.
Classic sync clients want a full local mirror. A 6 TB array does not fit on a laptop, and you shouldn’t have to choose which folders you’re allowed to see.
Put Cloudflare Access or an SSO proxy in front of Nextcloud and most clients break — the browser signs in fine while background requests quietly get a login page instead of files.
NAS Drive treats the gateway as a first-class step and uses two different browsers to clear it: your real one for the ceremony that needs your passkeys, and its own isolated one for the Nextcloud approval that must never inherit a session.
An embedded web view is not your browser profile. Your platform authenticator, Touch ID enrolment and saved passkeys are simply absent from it, so an identity provider offering WebAuthn falls back to a password typed into a window an app drew. The gateway step goes to the real thing.
Nextcloud’s own approval runs in NAS Drive’s embedded window, in a non-persistent store that carries no account session in and leaves none behind. Adding a second user reaches a real login form, not a “grant access” page already signed in as somebody else.
Each layer is discovered, authenticated, stored and expired on its own. Nothing borrows another layer’s result, which is why NAS Drive can tell you which thing lapsed.
| Layer | What sits there | What NAS Drive holds | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layer 0 | Network prerequisite — VPN, private DNS, WARP, Tailscale, your LAN | Nothing stored. Reachability is measured, never assumed | Detected |
| Layer 1 | Edge gateway — Cloudflare Access, reverse proxy, authenticated proxy | A session cookie, won in your real browser, renewable silently | Adapter shipped |
| Layer 2 | Enterprise identity — OIDC discovery, OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, mutual TLS | An authorization code, exchanged — never a password | Standards shipped |
| Layer 3 | Nextcloud — Login Flow v2, run in the isolated window | A device credential in the Keychain, revocable on its own | Shipped |
| Layer 4 | Storage and permissions — shares, groups, external storage, NAS availability | Your server's. NAS Drive holds no authority here at all | Server's own |
The failure mode that loses people’s files is a client that reacts to an authentication problem as though it were a storage problem. These are the four cases and what happens in each.
| What happened | What NAS Drive does | Your files |
|---|---|---|
| Gateway session expired | Says so by name — “Cloudflare Access has expired. Your Nextcloud device credential remains valid.” One button re-authenticates in your browser. | Local copies open normally. Remote changes pause and resume. |
| Device credential revoked | Reported as its own separate condition, not folded into the gateway notice. You revoked it on the server, so it says that. | Nothing local is deleted. Sign in again to resume. |
| VPN or LAN gone | Treated as a route problem. If a second route to the same account is proven, it switches; otherwise it waits. | Pinned and downloaded files stay available offline. |
| Login page instead of files | Classified as an authentication failure, judged against what the item was supposed to be — so a genuine .html file still downloads as a file. | Never mistaken for an empty folder. No deletion propagates. |
Solid chips are in the product today. Outlined ones are specified and wait for a reproducible integration test before they are ever advertised as supported.
After the first sign-in, NAS Drive has no interface you need to visit. The Finder window is the product.
Sharing, links and version history belong to the file on your server. Keeping and releasing local bytes belongs to this Mac. NAS Drive keeps those two ideas apart — no remote action ever appears or disappears because a local copy arrived.
| Menu entry | What it does | Acts on |
|---|---|---|
| Share… | Creates a share through your server's own sharing rules. | Server |
| Manage Access… | Lists existing shares, changeable and revocable in place. | Server |
| Copy Link | A working public link on the clipboard, one click. | Server |
| View Online | Opens the file in Nextcloud in your browser. | Server |
| Version History | The versions your server already keeps. | Server |
| Always Keep on This Device | A pin that outranks every automatic cleanup path. | This Mac |
| Free Up Space | Releases local bytes. The server copy is untouched — no delete is reachable from here. | This Mac |
macOS vocabulary, not a private one. Every file in the drive is in exactly one of these, and the word for it is the word Finder already uses.
Each of these is a rule in the product, closed by a live test before it was allowed to count.
NAS Drive is a client. It adds no backend, no relay and no account of its own. If you uninstall it tomorrow, your Nextcloud is exactly as it was.
No file-content telemetry. No filenames in analytics. No credential or token logging. Diagnostic bundles redact hosts, identities and paths, and you choose when one is collected.
The product only advertises what has been measured. These are in the tree and not finished — listed so you can judge the direction, not so you can plan around them.
On a NAS, a home server, a VPS or a hosted instance. Generic WebDAV servers connect too, with a reduced set of features — sharing and version history come from Nextcloud.
NAS Drive installs as a Finder File Provider extension. macOS requires a containing application to host it; that app stays out of your Dock after setup.
HTTPS is recommended everywhere. Plain HTTP to a LAN Nextcloud is allowed only per route, only on a private or tunnelled network, and is refused outright on a public one.
No. There is no NAS Drive server, no relay and no account. Content moves between your Mac and your Nextcloud, and nowhere else. What stays locally is what you opened or pinned.
Files list as placeholders and download when you open them. Free Up Space releases local bytes and leaves the server copy alone. Always Keep on This Device is the opposite promise, and it outranks every automatic cleanup path.
That case is the reason the product exists. The gateway is authenticated in a browser window and its session is tracked separately from your Nextcloud credential, so when one expires the other keeps working and the notice tells you which is which.
Pinned and previously downloaded files open normally. Changes queue and settle when the connection returns. An outage never triggers deletion, on either side.
No. Finder is the interface. What’s installed alongside it is a menu-bar status item and a settings window — neither of which shows you a second copy of your folder tree.
Generic WebDAV works today. A direct NAS provider that skips Nextcloud entirely is on the roadmap and is not built yet.
NAS Drive is in owner-gated testing while its release gates close. Ask to be told when a signed build is available.