Troubleshooting

Fixes for the problems that reach our inbox most often.

Most Finder-integration problems come from how PolyDrive is installed, not from your drives or credentials — and none of those are fixed by restarting your Mac. Jump to what you are seeing:

• “The application cannot be used right now”
• Stuck on “Loading…”, or “items may be out of date”
• Drives never appear in Finder's sidebar
• A drive went back to “Add to Finder” after an update
• Only two cloud drives are in Finder
• A sign-in has expired
• An orange warning triangle on a file
• Transfers slower than they should be
• An Android phone doesn't appear
• An SMB share won't mount
• A Linux disk or SD card doesn't mount
• Advanced checks, and how to report a problem

Nothing here is answered by the FAQ? Email [email protected] and paste the diagnostics from the in-app error dialog's Copy Diagnostics button.

“Add to Finder” fails: The application cannot be used right now

macOS refuses to connect PolyDrive's Finder extension. This is almost always an installation problem: more than one copy of PolyDrive is on your Mac.

When several copies exist — an old version in the Trash, a second copy in Downloads — macOS may bind Finder to a copy that later disappears. Keep exactly one:

1. Quit PolyDrive (menu-bar cloud icon → Quit PolyDrive).
2. Keep the copy in /Applications; delete every other copy and empty the Trash.
3. Open PolyDrive from the Applications folder and try “Add to Finder” again.

To list every copy macOS knows about, run this in Terminal:

mdfind "kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == 'com.jiefan.PolyDrive'"

A drive is stuck on “Loading…” or says “items may be out of date”

Finder's file-provider daemon occasionally holds on to stale state — typically right after updating PolyDrive. Restart the daemon (it relaunches automatically and affects only cloud-drive locations):

killall fileproviderd

Give it ~10 seconds before opening the drive again; the very first access after a restart can still fail while it rebuilds its state. If the drive still won't load, use the drive's … → Repair Finder Registration action inside PolyDrive.

Drives never appear in Finder's sidebar

Check that PolyDrive's extensions are enabled: System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. PolyDrive should be enabled under both File Providers (cloud drives) and File System Extensions (local Linux disks). Registered drives appear under Locations in Finder's sidebar.

A drive went back to “Add to Finder” after an update

Expected, and nothing is lost. Replacing the app replaces the extension inside it, and macOS drops the old Finder registration when it does. Open PolyDrive and press Add to Finder on each drive that asks for it; your settings, credentials and anything kept offline are still there.

Only two of my cloud drives are in Finder

That is the free version: the two cloud drives you added first stay registered with Finder, and the rest keep their settings but sit outside it until you unlock. Every SMB share, Android phone and local disk is exempt — those are never counted. The 7-day trial lifts the limit without a payment method, and the one-time purchase lifts it permanently.

A drive says its sign-in has expired

Drives you signed into through a browser — Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Jottacloud, Tencent Weiyun — hold a token the service can withdraw. Revoking PolyDrive's access on the provider's website does it, and so does signing the same account in somewhere else on services that issue one token at a time.

Open the drive's … menu → Drive Settings… and press Sign In Again. It reopens the provider's own sign-in page in your browser; nothing else about the drive changes, and files kept offline are not re-downloaded.

A file has an orange warning triangle

The last change you made to that file did not reach the server. The badge is PolyDrive's, not Finder's, and it clears itself the moment a later save of the same file succeeds.

Open Activity from the menu-bar icon to see the reason the service gave. In practice it is nearly always one of four things: the account is full, the server refused the write (a read-only share, an expired token, a bucket policy), the connection dropped mid-upload, or the name contains something that service will not store. Fix the cause and save the file again — there is no separate retry to press.

Transfers are slower than the connection should allow

Three different causes, with three different answers:

• Dragging many small files in Finder. Finder creates remote files one at a time and hands PolyDrive about five at once, which caps any drag at roughly twenty files a second whatever your bandwidth. Use PolyDrive's Transfer a Folder section instead — Upload Folder… and Download Folder… run as many parallel transfers as the service accepts, up to about seven times faster, and a run you stop can be resumed.
• The service's own limits. Several consumer services meter requests rather than bandwidth — Nutstore's free plan, for instance, allows 600 requests per 30 minutes for everything together. Nothing on your Mac can go faster than that, and a folder of small files spends the allowance quickest.
• Opening a very large file for the first time. Contents are fetched in ranges on demand, so a video plays before it has fully arrived but seeking far ahead waits for that part. Right-click → Keep Available Offline downloads it once and keeps it.

An Android phone doesn't appear

1. Unlock the phone. Most Android phones refuse to list files while the screen is locked, even when they are plugged in.
2. Pull down the phone's USB notification and choose File transfer (sometimes “MTP” or “Transferring files”). “Charging only” and “Photo transfer (PTP)” both look connected on the Mac and show no files, or only the camera roll.
3. Try the cable. Charge-only USB cables are common and give exactly this symptom.

If macOS's own photo service has already claimed the phone, PolyDrive routes through it rather than asking you to quit anything — you do not need to close Photos or Image Capture. Do not unplug the phone during a copy; let the transfer finish or stop it first.

An SMB share won't mount

PolyDrive checks the password before it mounts anything, so a wrong password is a message in the window rather than a system dialog. If the message is about reaching the server instead:

• Try the NAS's IP address in place of its name. Name lookup on a home network fails more often than the network itself does.
• Check that you entered the share name, not a folder inside it — Media, not Media/Movies.
• Wake the NAS. A disk that has spun down can take longer to answer than macOS is willing to wait, and a second attempt then works.
• On a VPN, confirm the share is reachable at all: macOS mounts SMB itself, so anything Finder's own Connect to Server cannot reach is not something PolyDrive can reach either.

A Linux disk or SD card doesn't mount

PolyDrive mounts ext2, ext3 and ext4 volumes — including disk images and Raspberry Pi cards — read-only. Other Linux filesystems (btrfs, XFS, ZFS) are not supported, and a card that macOS offers to initialise is usually one of those rather than a broken card.

When PolyDrive says a Linux disk is present but not mounted, eject it and plug it in again first. If that changes nothing, macOS's own mount service is stuck: the button beside that message copies a command that restarts it, which you paste into Terminal and run with your administrator password. Your Mac does not need restarting.

Always eject before unplugging. Pulling a card while it is still mounted is what wedges that service in the first place, and once it is stuck nothing else will mount either until it is restarted.

Advanced checks (Terminal)

These help you (or us) confirm what macOS thinks is installed. None of them modify anything except killall fileproviderd, which is a safe restart.

If either of the first two commands prints several lines — or a path that no longer exists — go back to “Add to Finder” fails above and remove the extra copies.

Reporting a problem

Email [email protected]. Four things turn a report into a fix instead of a conversation:

• Which service the drive connects to, and whether the others behave.
• What you clicked, and what happened instead of what you expected.
• The exact error text — a screenshot of it is fine.
• The output of Copy Diagnostics, if an error dialog offered it. It holds version numbers and install paths only: never your files, your file names, or your credentials.

We read every message. There is no ticket system to log into and no account to create.