ExpanDrive 2.0 Released

A while back, we reviewed ExpanDrive, the utility that treats any network drive like a regular external or internal hard drive. Just recently, ExpanDrive 2.0 has been released with some nice new features.

The biggest and best new feature has to be Amazon S3 support. If you don’t know what that is, it is a service from Amazon that allows you to host files. You can now easily add an S3 account to your accounts list, and connect to it like it is a USB or FireWire drive. But, this means much more than just that. Most people buy hosting for a website or web service. But, one of the points of Amazon S3 is offsite backup. So, when your S3 is treated like a regular hard drive, this makes things so much easier. ExpanDrive even includes a contextual menu in the Finder for changing permissions on files.

The next biggest feature “ or upgrade “ is the engine itself. It has been completely rewritten for this 2.0 upgrade, and you should notice a nice speed boost. You should also notice faster browsing. Of course, nothing can make up for a bad host, a bad server or a bad Internet connection, but ExpanDrive uses more of what’s there now. ExpanDrive can now detect edits that have been made on the server too, as a part of this new engine. This feature is still experimental though.

There are two other features that are also very notable. The first one is that FTP/FTPS (not to be mistaken with SFTP) has come out of BETA. When version 1.3 came out, they introduced FTP/FTPS as a BETA feature, but it is no longer that. The second one is actually two. First, they’ve updated the GUI to make it more Mac-like. There is now an eject button on each connected server in the list too. The second part is the customization of drive icons. If you drop an image into “~/Library/Application Support/ExpanDrive”, it will appear in a list of icons that you can choose from when creating a new drive. ExpanDrive also has 5 icons built-in.

ExpanDrive retails for $39.95 and you can upgrade from version 1 for $19.95. It is a nice upgrade, but still may seem to expensive to some. There is still one thing I would like to see in it though, AFP support.

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