Disk Ferry

Disk Ferry is a small native macOS app that wraps rclone for cautious, low-cache folder transfers from a Mac-attached drive to an SMB-mounted Windows drive or another mounted destination.

It is built for the boring but important job: move large photo, video, and backup folders without turning Finder, Photos, Spotlight, thumbnails, or media indexing into part of the workflow.

What It Does

• Select a source folder and a destination folder with native macOS folder pickers.
• Run rclone copy with conservative defaults.
• Write full logs to the destination under _transfer_logs.
• Show live transfer output without keeping large local logs.
• Avoid thumbnails, previews, EXIF parsing, media databases, and file-content caches.
• Resume interrupted transfers by running the same task again.
• Optionally run a size-only check after copying.

Why This Exists

Finder is convenient, but it is not ideal for multi-terabyte transfers across external disks and SMB mounts. Disk Ferry intentionally stays simple:

source drive -> rclone -> SMB / external destination

No temporary staging on the Mac. No photo library import. No preview generation.

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later
• Swift 5.9 or later for building from source
• rclone installed locally

Install rclone with Homebrew:

brew install rclone

Disk Ferry searches common Homebrew locations such as /opt/homebrew/bin/rclone and /usr/local/bin/rclone, and also lets you provide a custom path.

Build And Run

From the repository root:

./script/build_and_run.sh

The script builds the Swift package, creates dist/DiskFerry.app, adds the app icon, and launches it as a normal macOS app bundle.

You can also verify launch:

./script/build_and_run.sh --verify

Default Copy Command

Disk Ferry generates an rclone copy command with defaults tuned for external disks and SMB:

rclone copy "$SOURCE" "$TARGET" \
  --stats 1s \
  --stats-log-level NOTICE \
  --transfers 1 \
  --checkers 2 \
  --retries 10 \
  --low-level-retries 20 \
  --exclude ".DS_Store" \
  --exclude "._*" \
  --exclude ".Spotlight-V100/**" \
  --exclude ".Trashes/**" \
  --exclude ".fseventsd/**" \
  --exclude ".TemporaryItems/**" \
  --log-file "$TARGET/_transfer_logs/YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.log" \
  --log-level INFO

When the destination is a mounted volume root, such as /Volumes/minipc, Disk Ferry copies into a child folder named after the source folder. For example:

source:      /Volumes/PhotoDisk/Photos
destination: /Volumes/minipc
actual path: /Volumes/minipc/Photos

This avoids scattering thousands of files directly into the drive root.

Verification

Post-copy verification is optional and off by default. When enabled, Disk Ferry runs:

rclone check "$SOURCE" "$TARGET" --size-only --one-way

This is intentionally not a full hash check. Full hash verification can be slow and may read a large amount of data from both drives.

Privacy And Cache Policy

Disk Ferry does not:

• Generate thumbnails
• Preview photos or videos
• Read EXIF metadata
• Build a media database
• Hash every file by default
• Cache file contents
• Stage data in a local temporary directory

Local app state is limited to small settings and recent task metadata. Transfer logs are written to the destination by default.

Project Layout

Sources/DiskFerry/App       App entry point
Sources/DiskFerry/Models    Transfer, progress, and status models
Sources/DiskFerry/Services  rclone, precheck, parsing, and scanner services
Sources/DiskFerry/Stores    App state and recent task persistence
Sources/DiskFerry/Support   Small platform and formatting helpers
Sources/DiskFerry/Views     SwiftUI views
script/                     Build/run and icon generation scripts
Assets/                     Project icon assets

Roadmap

• Better progress parsing for more rclone output variants
• Optional report generation for failed or missing files
• Saved task templates
• More explicit SMB disconnect warnings
• Optional full verification with clear warnings

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please keep the central design constraint intact: Disk Ferry should remain a low-cache transfer controller, not a photo manager or file browser.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.