Away from home
Helix is built for laptops as much as desktops. A NAS that is out of reach is not a failure, a NAS that is asleep can be woken, and drives come back by themselves after the lid opens.
The background reconnect
While you are signed in, Helix watches every mounted drive. When one drops, it is reconnected in the background, with a tray notification when it goes and when it comes back, and an entry in the audit log. Only drives with Connect automatically on are reconnected.
| The drop | What Helix does |
|---|---|
| The NAS refused the mount | retries with a growing delay |
| The NAS is not answering (Unreachable) | retries every 30 seconds, without counting it as a failure, so it reconnects within seconds of the NAS coming back |
| The drive is pinned and you are elsewhere (Away) | waits; nothing is attempted |
| You disconnected it yourself | nothing — a deliberate disconnect is never "fixed" |
Before trying to mount, Helix checks whether the NAS answers at all, so an absent NAS costs a two-second check rather than a thirty-second timeout.
After sleep and network changes
When the computer wakes from sleep, or the network comes back after being down, Helix immediately rechecks every drive and connects the auto-connect drives that are down, instead of waiting out whatever retry delay had built up.
A drive's home network
Edit a drive and switch on Reconnect automatically only on your network. The drive is then pinned to the network you are on now.
- On that network, nothing changes.
- Anywhere else, the background reconnect and the connect on launch leave the drive alone. Its row shows a neutral grey Away pill instead of an amber Unreachable one.
- Arriving back on the home network connects the pinned auto-connect drives that are down.
- Anything you press — the row, a group, a selection, Connect all — still connects.
A network is recognised by the hardware address of its router, not its Wi-Fi name, so it works on a wired dock and two cafés called "Guest" are not confused. If the network cannot be identified, Helix assumes you are home rather than wrongly holding drives back.
An address for away from home
If you can reach the NAS from elsewhere — over a VPN or Tailscale — give the drive an Address away from home, such as nas.example.ts.net or 100.64.0.5.
| Situation | Address used |
|---|---|
| Pinned, and away from the home network | the away address, directly |
| On the home network, unpinned, or network unknown | the home address, falling back to the away address if home does not answer |
| Neither answers | the drive shows Unreachable and Helix keeps retrying |
A drive with an away address is never "Away" — it always has somewhere to connect. A mount made over the VPN stays on the VPN until it drops; Helix does not move it back to the home address on arriving home, since that would mean unmounting a share you might have a file open on.
Waking a sleeping NAS
Give a drive its NAS's Wake-on-LAN hardware address (MAC address, such as 1a-2b-3c-4d-5e-6f), and when the NAS does not answer, Helix sends it a wake-up packet and connects once it has booted.
- On Windows, Look up next to the field finds the address for you. It works while you are on the NAS's network and the NAS is awake — which is usually when you are adding it. macOS has no lookup; type the address.
- Packets are sent at most once every five minutes per NAS, so thirteen shares of one NAS send one packet.
- No packet is sent when a pinned drive's computer is away from home — it could not reach the NAS anyway.
- Wake NAS on the right-click menu, Ctrl+W on a row, or
--wakeon the command line sends one immediately.
The NAS itself must have Wake-on-LAN enabled, and the packet does not leave the local network.