Introduction

Helix is a desktop app for managing connections to your NAS drives, on Windows and macOS. It maps network shares to drive letters, shows at a glance which are up, puts them back when they drop, and keeps the credentials they use encrypted at rest.

What it does

• Connects and disconnects shares — one at a time, a saved group at a time, a ticked selection, or all of them at once. A failure names the drive and says why, rather than interrupting you with a dialog.
• Watches them while you work — a drive that drops is reconnected in the background, and a tray notification tells you it happened.
• Knows where you are — a drive can be pinned to its home network, given a second address for use over a VPN, and woken with Wake-on-LAN when the NAS is asleep.
• Explains a failure — a four-step connection check tells "the NAS is off" apart from "the password is wrong" and "the drive letter is taken".
• Runs on a timetable — schedules connect a group in the morning or put everything down at night.
• Stays out of the way — it lives in the tray (or the macOS menu bar), answers global shortcuts and a command line, and can lock itself when you step away.
• Keeps a record — every change, drop and automatic reconnect lands in an audit log, in your own language.

How it is built

Helix is open source under the MIT License.

Where to go next