Reaching a cloud PolyDrive doesn't list

Tested 18 September 2026 against rclone v1.75.1. About ten minutes, and a terminal for two commands. rclone is an independent open source project, not ours — this page explains how to put the two together, and where the joins show.

PolyDrive's picker carries 47 entries. If the service you need is not one of them, there is usually still a way in. rclone speaks to around 57 storage systems and can publish any of them as a small server on your own machine. PolyDrive mounts that server. rclone does the talking to the provider; PolyDrive does the Finder half — sidebar entry, files that download when you open them, no FUSE layer, no kernel extension.

• Which clouds this is for
• Before you start
• Step 1 · Configure the remote in rclone
• Step 2 · Serve it on your machine
• Step 3 · Connect PolyDrive to it
• Several clouds behind one drive
• Keeping it running
• The settings that decide how it feels
• SFTP instead of WebDAV
• Troubleshooting
• Know this before you rely on it

Which clouds this is for

These are services rclone reaches and PolyDrive has no entry for, as of September 2026. The names are rclone's own.

rclone marks some of these experimental or read-mostly, and a few of them cannot rename a file or keep its modification date. Read the page for your provider on rclone.org before you move anything important through the bridge — the limits you meet in Finder will be that backend's limits, not PolyDrive's.

Before you start

• A machine that stays awake. The bridge exists only while rclone is running. On your own Mac that is fine, but the drive goes away when the Mac sleeps; on a NAS or a small always-on server it is always there.
• An account with the provider, and a browser for the sign-in step if it uses OAuth.
• One drive's worth of your PolyDrive allowance. A bridge counts as a single drive no matter how many remotes sit behind it — see Several clouds behind one drive.

Step 1 · Configure the remote in rclone

Install rclone with Homebrew, or take the binary from rclone.org:

brew install rclone

Then run its interactive setup. It asks for a name, a storage type and whatever that provider needs; OAuth providers open a browser and hand the token back by themselves.

rclone config

Call the remote something short — mycloud below. Prove it works before PolyDrive is anywhere near it:

rclone lsd mycloud:

That prints the top-level folders. If it errors here, the problem is between rclone and the provider, and rclone's own documentation is where to take it.

Step 2 · Serve it on your machine

One command publishes the remote as a WebDAV server on the loopback interface, reachable only from this machine:

rclone serve webdav mycloud: \
  --addr 127.0.0.1:8080 \
  --user polydrive --pass 'choose-a-long-password' \
  --vfs-cache-mode writes \
  --dir-cache-time 1m

What each part is doing:

Leave that terminal window open for now — Keeping it running makes it permanent.

Step 3 · Connect PolyDrive to it

In PolyDrive, add a cloud drive, choose WebDAV, and fill in:

• Server Address: http://127.0.0.1:8080
• Username and Password: the pair you invented in step 2

Give the drive the provider's name rather than “rclone”, since that is what it will be called in the Finder sidebar. It behaves like any other PolyDrive drive from here: files list immediately, contents arrive when you open them, and you can keep a folder offline.

Several clouds behind one drive

rclone can present several remotes as one tree, which PolyDrive then mounts as a single drive. Each remote becomes a folder at the top level:

rclone config create everything combine \
  upstreams "proton=proton: archive=ia: work=filescom:"

rclone serve webdav everything: --addr 127.0.0.1:8080 \
  --user polydrive --pass 'choose-a-long-password' --vfs-cache-mode writes

Keeping it running

rclone serve has no background mode of its own. On macOS, hand it to launchd so it starts at login and restarts if it stops. Save this as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.example.rclone-bridge.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>      <string>net.example.rclone-bridge</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/opt/homebrew/bin/rclone</string>
    <string>serve</string>
    <string>webdav</string>
    <string>mycloud:</string>
    <string>--addr</string>          <string>127.0.0.1:8080</string>
    <string>--user</string>          <string>polydrive</string>
    <string>--pass</string>          <string>choose-a-long-password</string>
    <string>--vfs-cache-mode</string><string>writes</string>
    <string>--dir-cache-time</string><string>1m</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>  <true/>
  <key>KeepAlive</key>  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Load it:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.example.rclone-bridge.plist

The password sits in that file in the clear, so keep it readable only by you (chmod 600). On an Intel Mac the rclone path is /usr/local/bin/rclone; which rclone tells you which one you have. On a NAS, run the same command in a container that restarts with the box, and point PolyDrive at the NAS's address instead of 127.0.0.1 — over a network, read the security note first.

The settings that decide how it feels

Writing: --vfs-cache-mode

writes is the right answer for a mounted drive. rclone writes the incoming file to a cache directory first and uploads it when it is closed, which is what lets Finder copy into backends that will not take a stream of unknown length. The cost is disk: a 40 GB copy briefly needs 40 GB free. Cap it with --vfs-cache-max-size 20G if space is tight. full also caches what you read, which helps if you reopen the same files constantly and hurts if you sweep through a large library once.

Freshness: --dir-cache-time

A file you add from the provider's own app or website appears in Finder only after rclone's listing expires. PolyDrive's Refresh from Server asks rclone, and rclone answers from that cache, so it cannot shorten the wait. One minute is a good compromise. If you would rather clear it on demand, add --rc to the serve command and run rclone rc vfs/forget.

Do not use rclone serve s3

It looks like the natural choice and it is the one bridge that does not work. PolyDrive creates a folder the way object storage does — a zero-byte marker object — and rclone's S3 server turns that marker into an ordinary file with the folder's name. The first write into the folder then fails, because a file of that name is already there. Tested and reproduced, 18 September 2026. Use WebDAV or SFTP.

SFTP instead of WebDAV

SFTP is the same idea with a different protocol, and worth trying if a provider behaves oddly over WebDAV — unusual filenames and timestamps tend to survive it better.

rclone serve sftp mycloud: \
  --addr 127.0.0.1:2022 \
  --user polydrive --pass 'choose-a-long-password' \
  --vfs-cache-mode writes

In PolyDrive choose SFTP, set Server Address to 127.0.0.1:2022, and use the same username and password. rclone generates its host key the first time it runs and keeps it, so the key PolyDrive remembers stays valid.

Troubleshooting

Know this before you rely on it

• Keep the bridge on the loopback interface. WebDAV authentication over plain http:// sends the password in a form anyone on the path can read, and the server hands out your whole cloud. If the bridge has to live on another machine, put it behind something like Tailscale, or give rclone a certificate with --cert and --key and connect over https://. Never forward the port to the internet.
• The tokens belong to rclone. A remote you sign in to through rclone config is authorised to rclone's application registration, not PolyDrive's. Revoke it in the provider's account settings the same way you would any other app.
• Two caches, not one. PolyDrive caches what it learns from the bridge, and rclone caches what it learns from the provider. When something looks stale, the second one is usually the reason.
• We cannot support the rclone half. rclone is an independent project under the MIT licence with no connection to PolyDrive. Configuration questions about a particular backend belong on its forum. Anything that goes wrong between PolyDrive and a running bridge is ours, and we want to hear about it.
• A bridge is a workaround, not a feature. It adds a process that has to be running, a cache that has to be tuned and a second project's release schedule. Where PolyDrive supports a service directly, use that instead.

Tell us which one to build in

Every service in the picker got there because somebody asked. If you are bridging one, write to [email protected] and say which — that is how the queue is ordered. If the bridge itself misbehaves in Finder, include what the error dialog's Copy Diagnostics button gives you. See also Troubleshooting.

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