NetDrive on macOS — Menu Bar, Spotlight, and Dark Mode
How NetDrive integrates with macOS beyond mounting a drive — menu bar status, Spotlight search across mounted volumes, and native Dark Mode support.
A photographer running two Mac minis in a home studio keeps a Backblaze B2 bucket and an Amazon S3 archive mounted through NetDrive, alongside a local scratch disk for active edits. What she wants day to day isn’t more mount options — it’s for those drives to behave like the rest of macOS already does: a menu bar icon she can glance at, Spotlight that finds a RAW file no matter which drive it’s sitting on, and a Finder window that doesn’t look out of place once she switches to Dark Mode at night.
A Cloud Drive That Feels Native on macOS
NetDrive lets Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, SFTP, WebDAV and more appear as native drives on Windows and macOS — no syncing, no full downloads.
- Menu bar status without opening the main NetDrive window
- Spotlight finds files across every mounted drive
- Dark Mode and native Finder icons, no extra setup
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The Menu Bar Icon
NetDrive has had a native macOS menu bar icon since version 3.3.349 (February 2018). Click it and you get a quick list of currently mounted drives and their connection state, without switching over to NetDrive’s own window first. For someone who mounts a handful of providers and mostly just wants to confirm a drive is still connected before opening a file, the menu bar icon is the faster path — it sits in the same row as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth status, always one glance away.
Spotlight Search Across Mounted Drives
As of version 3.16.667 (June 2022), NetDrive registers its mounted volumes with the correct Spotlight drive type. That means pressing ⌘+Space and searching a filename returns results from files living on a mounted provider, not just files already sitting on the internal disk or in Finder’s recents. For the photographer juggling B2, S3, and a local scratch disk, that’s the difference between remembering which drive a shoot ended up on and just typing the client’s name.
This works the same way across every provider NetDrive mounts, so a WebDAV share, a Google Drive account, and an S3 bucket all show up in the same search rather than requiring you to open each drive separately to check.
Dark Mode and a Native Finder Presence
NetDrive has supported macOS Dark Mode since version 3.8.921 (September 2019) — its own windows, icons, and menu bar glyph switch automatically when you toggle System Settings → Appearance, with nothing to configure inside NetDrive itself. A mounted drive shows up in Finder’s sidebar exactly like an external disk: draggable, double-clickable, and now searchable through Spotlight as covered above.
The installer itself is notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper doesn’t flag it on first launch — no right-click-to-open workaround needed. On Apple Silicon Macs, NetDrive has run natively since version 3.14.309, so none of this depends on Rosetta translation. Keep in mind that NetDrive 3.18 and later require macOS 14 Sonoma or newer; if your Mac is still on macOS 13 Ventura or earlier, NetDrive 3.17 is the version to use instead.
Checking Everything Is Active
- Open NetDrive and confirm the menu bar icon appears near your other system status icons — click it to see each mounted drive’s connection state.
- Toggle System Settings → Appearance between Light and Dark. NetDrive’s windows and menu bar glyph should switch immediately, with no restart required.
- Press ⌘+Space and search for a filename you know exists on a mounted drive. Spotlight should surface it the same way it would a local file.
If any of these don’t behave as described, confirm you’re running NetDrive 3.18 or later and that NetDrive’s system extension is approved under System Settings → Privacy & Security.
Wrap-up
None of this changes what NetDrive mounts — it changes how much the mount feels like it belongs on your Mac instead of sitting off to the side in its own window. For the Apple Silicon specifics behind the native build, see NetDrive on Apple Silicon. For the Windows side of file-status visibility, see File Status Icons in Windows Explorer; for setting up a drive on macOS from scratch, see Mount a WebDAV Server on macOS with NetDrive.
— Tayson, NetDrive