Automatically Connect to a Network Drive on Mac OS X Start Up & Login
It can be helpful to configure Mac OS X to automatically mount shared network drives, this is particularly true for those of us who regularly connect to a network drive for file sharing or backups.
Setting up automatic network drive connections in OS X is a two-step process, you must mount the drive, then you add it to your automatic login items. This should work flawlessly in most versions of OS X, but we’ll cover an alternative approach that uses Automator to mount a network drive automatically on login as well.
1) Mounting the Network Drive
If you’re already familiar with mapping a network drive in Mac OS X you can skip the first part of this and go straight to System Preferences in the second section.
- From the OS X desktop, pull down the “Go” menu and select “Connect to Server”
- Connect to the server and mount the drive you want to automatically connect to on boot
- Choose Guest or for a specific user check the box next to “Remember this password in my keychain” – you must select to remember the password otherwise the automatic login event can not happen without logging into the network drive
Next, you add the network drive to automatically connect on OS X by bringing it into your Login Items list.
2) Setting Up Automatic Connections to the Network Drive on Login
Once you are connected to the network drive we can set up automatic connections upon logging into the Mac:
- Open System Preferences and click on “Users & Groups”
- Select your user name from the list and then click the “Login Items” tab
- Drag & drop a mounted network drive into the login items list
- Optional: check the “Hide” box to keep the drives window from opening on each login and boot
This can be used to automatically connect to and mount SMB drives for those that need to share files with a Windows PC often, though you’ll need to enable SAMBA beforehand within File Sharing preferences.
Confirm the drive will automatically mount by logging out of the active user account and logging back in, or by rebooting the Mac.
Alternate: How to Enable Automatic Mounting of Network Drives on Login with OS X Automator
One of our readers pointed out in the comments a great trick that uses Automator to automatically mount network drives on Mac login. This is quite easy to setup as well, and if you’re having problems with the above method being reliable (like in OS X Yosemite), then this Automator method works very well:
- Launch Automator in OS X and create a new “Application”
- Drag “Get Specified Server” into the workflow, click “Add” and place the network drive network location address into the field
- Next, drag “Connect to Server” into the workflow
- Click on “Run” then login to the network drive as usual to verify that it works, choosing to save the login credentials
- Save the Automator application with a name like ‘Automatically Mount Network Drive Share’, and save it somewhere easy to locate like ~/Documents/ and then drag this into the Login Items list of OS X
Here is what this workflow in Automator looks like, click to enlarge:
The next time the Mac logs in, that Automator Mount script will run and the network drive will mount as usual. This works very well, and I’m using it right now in OS X Yosemite. A big thanks to Dan for this automator trick!
If you want to stop this drive from automatically loading when you login or reboot the Mac, simply remove it (or the Automator app) from the automatic launch list in OS X and the network volume or network drive will no longer automatically connect any longer.
Thanks for the Automator tip and procedure. It seems step 4 is invalid as there seems to be no option “to save the login credentials”, only “save to keychain” which does not seem to help (I don’t use keychain anyway). So, at login I have to enter the credentials for this to work unless I am missing something. Please advise if possible.
I also am going to look into putting multiple drives that I wish to connect to at login. I presume this is fairly straightforward. Thanks again,
Nils
It’s been quite some years but this trick is still working; however, I have another hard disk attached per USB on the main mountable one which is also mountable. So, what happens is that, because they are two disks attached to one, at system start a window pops up asking which one to mount and this is nerving me so much. Everything independently works well but now how do I get rid of that window pop up? Afterall, once that main HDD is mounted, the second attached to it is also mounted.
Just resolved it with:
afp://IPaddress/sharename
There might be this afp://IPaddress:port number.
Take of the port number and replace it with the folder sharename.
afp://IPaddress/sharename
Anybody know why my script runs but still prompts for the password before the drives load? Thanks!
Anybody know why the drives still pop up after a reboot? I have the boxes checked to hide them.
Hi
Can you tell me if the volume is unmount to finder but not in /Volumes.
When you execute the script, you have /Volumes/xxx-01 and /Volumes/xxx-02 etc…
Thank you very much !
Have a nice day !
But what about keeping the drive mounted after you log in? Say your server reboots, your Macbook Pro goes to sleep and wakes up, etc. How can you make sure the the network drive stays connected when these things happen?
Doesn’t work for me. The Automator approach manages to bypass the returning login prompt but what happens is that the Automator app is started with the script ready to play instead of the script itself being run.
I’m probably doing something wrong.
Automator works to automatically connect to network drives, you are probably doing something wrong. Try again with following instructions, save it as an app, that goes into Login Items.
Thanks so much. I thought I was going to have to buy another hard drive.
Thank you for this information. I used the OS X Automator instructions and that work great.
I added a “pause” entry between “Get Specified Server” and “Connect to Server” of 10 seconds for 1st folder and 15 seconds for the 2nd folder. The pause was added because using WIFI to connect to the network shares would give an error message that it couldn’t connect to them.
When I go to click run, this message pops up:
“The action ‘connect to servers’ encountered an error.
Failed to connect to server ‘…..'”
What do I do???
I took this a step further and used Keyboard Maestro to set a wake trigger. My problem was that I rarely log out, just sleep. I wanted to mount to a trigger when I woke up my mac at work. I set the trigger for waking and looking for my work’s wireless network. Seems to work fine.
Thank you so much
The Automator version works much better on 10.10 for me.
Thanks!!
Thanks also for the launchd comment, that will be useful.
D
Thanks for the advice – Automator works a treat and is really simple.
I use a simple Automator application i made. Simply drag get specified server into workflow, enter the address; afp://xx.x.x.x:548 then drag connect to server into the workflow. Run it to verify and then save as application. You can then set it to run at login from your System preferences.
Dan’s simple Automator script is great. To mine I added the specific share hosted by the remote server. Its address looks like afp://myserver/fileshare. It could also look like afp://myserver:548/fileshare or afp://10.0.0.23:548/fileshare
In any case, I (tested and) saved that script and then dragged it into Settings/Users&Groups/myusername/LoginItems. Thanks Dan!
Almost six years later!
So? I’m still reading here and obviously, so are you :)
How do you keep it connected? The SMB network drive on my home Synology server disconnects by itself and I have into finder , click on the Synology server, and then double-click on the share name to reconnect it.
Since I’m not at my computer all day, I wanted to avoid any solution that requires interaction from the user. It should quietly run in the background and keep drives connected.
It didnt work for me –
I can connect to the server using >finder>go>connect to a server> afp://username:password@192.168.1.144 and it works
But when I tried to create application using automator
i get the following error
The action “Connect to Servers” encountered an error.
Failed to connect to server “afp://username:password@192.168.1.144”.
Has anyone seen when using this method the drive shows up multiple times on the desktop if you have them visible? Every login it increments by one on the desktop. I have found no viable way to stop this behavior.
Yes I get the exact same problem, it’s annoying.
I was having problems with the same drive mounting multiple times and the window always opening. I did the Automator way and it fixed both of those things.
Checking the “hide” box DOES NOT prevent the drive window from opening on boot/login. If only it were that easy – I’ve been searching for how to not have the window open, but only mount the drive for years (and through OS X 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7) now.
Yes, the check bot does not work atleast in this case. Has anyone figure out how to resolve this issue ?
I’ve written an AppleScript to get around this problem. I hope it helps!
tell application "Finder" to open location "server path/server name"#Wait until the window opens.
delay 10
#Close the window if it exists, if it doesn't do nothing.
tell application "Finder"
if Finder window "server name" exists then
tell application "Finder" to close Finder window "server name"
end if
end tell
https://magicbeansvfx.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/sys-automatically-mount-server-using-applescript/
For mounting on boot rather than login you must use a command line option
– mount_ntfs
– mount_smbfs
– mount_msdos
– mount_afp
Stored as a LaunchAgent, ~/.launchd.conf, or set up with launchctl