The macFUSE tax on Apple Silicon
macOS has no built-in way to mount an S3 bucket. The usual answer is a FUSE-based driver — macFUSE with s3fs, rclone mount, or one of the commercial mounters built on the same foundation. Every one of them installs a kernel extension, and on Apple Silicon a kernel extension means booting into recoveryOS, dropping the machine to Reduced Security in Startup Security Utility, approving the extension in System Settings, and rebooting again. Then a major macOS upgrade lands and you find out whether the driver still loads.
There is another route, and it uses a protocol Macs have understood since the early Mac OS X days: WebDAV. Finder ships a WebDAV client. Point it at a server running on your own machine and the whole kernel-extension chapter disappears.
Starting the WebDAV server on a Mac
In AnyStorage, open Services in the sidebar and switch to the WebDAV tab. Press Start. The server is now listening on http://127.0.0.1:3211. If 3211 collides with something you already run, any port from 1 to 65535 works.
Basic authentication is always on — there is no anonymous mode to accidentally leave open. The username defaults to anystorage and the password is generated on first use as 24 random characters. Both are editable, there is a Regenerate button, and copy buttons sit next to the URL, the username and the password, because you are about to paste all three into Finder.
Leave the toggle enabled and the server comes back the next time you launch the app. It starts because you turned it on once, not because we decided for you.
Mounting it in Finder
In Finder, open the Go menu and choose Connect to Server. Cmd+K if you prefer. Paste http://127.0.0.1:3211, click Connect, and pick Registered User when the credential sheet appears. Username and password are the pair from the WebDAV tab.
The volume mounts, and every storage connection currently open in AnyStorage appears at the root as a folder named after that connection — an S3 bucket, a Cloudflare R2 bucket, Google Drive, Dropbox, an SFTP box, a plain local folder. Twenty connection types can show up there.
One wrinkle we would rather explain than let you trip over: connections attach lazily. After you quit and relaunch the app, a connection shows up under the WebDAV root only once you have opened it in AnyStorage. Click into the tab and the folder is there. A brand-new connection added while the server is running appears without restarting anything.
What works well, and what Finder does to you
Reads are streamed with HTTP range support, so scrubbing to the middle of a large video in QuickTime or IINA does not pull the whole file down first. Quick Look works. Dragging a folder of raw photos out of a bucket onto the Desktop works. Any app with a standard Open dialog can reach the mount, which is the real payoff — Finder is one client, not the only one.
Finder is also a famously chatty WebDAV client. It fires a burst of PROPFIND requests per directory, writes .DS_Store files, and probes for AppleDouble siblings that do not exist. Against a WebDAV server on the other side of the internet, that behavior is exactly why people call WebDAV slow. Against 127.0.0.1 each round trip costs a fraction of a millisecond and the chattiness stops mattering. What is left is the latency of the actual backend, which is fetched on demand.
Large directory listings still take as long as the backend takes to list them. No local server fixes that.
Limits worth knowing before you start
- The free tier serves read-only. Browse, stream, copy files out — all fine. Writing back through the mount needs a Pro license and its Full control mode. Pro users can also pin the server to read-only on purpose, which is a sensible habit when you are pointing an unfamiliar app at production data.
- There is no TLS in the current version. The endpoint is plain http and the auth scheme is HTTP Basic, which is precisely why we bind to 127.0.0.1 by default. A LAN access option exists for the cases that need it, and the app warns you when you enable it, because credentials then travel the network in the clear.
- No file locking. Two machines editing the same document through the mount is not a scenario the server protects you from, so do not treat it as shared team infrastructure.
- The top-level connection folders cannot be renamed or deleted over WebDAV, and you cannot move or copy a file directly from one connection folder to another through the mount. Cross-storage transfers belong in the app itself, where they run as a real transfer job with visible progress.
None of this touches the kernel. No admin password, no config file to hand-edit, no cache-mode flag to guess at, and the next macOS upgrade will not care that you did any of it.