Keep your SMB shares mounted on macOS
ShareBeacon is a free, open source macOS 26 and 27 menu bar app that keeps SMB shares connected after sleep, network changes, and disconnects, and restores your Finder sidebar favorites after every reconnect.
Installation
ShareBeacon requires macOS 26 or newer, including macOS 27. Releases are signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple.
brew install mjoe/sharebeacon/sharebeacon
To update later, run brew upgrade sharebeacon. A manual install is also available from the releases page.
Features
- Automatic recoveryReconnects shares after login, network changes, sleep and wake, and disconnects.
- Works with any routed networkKeeps shares available over LANs, Tailscale, WireGuard, and OpenVPN.
- Finder sidebar favoritesRestores your favorites after a share reconnects, with a safe no-op fallback.
- Sleep awarePauses all monitoring while the Mac sleeps and resumes with a network grace period.
- Multiple sharesIndependent SMB shares with per-share automatic reconnect or on-demand mounting.
- Credentials in the KeychainPasswords never appear in URLs, configuration, process arguments, or logs.
- User-owned mount pointsMount SMB shares in a user-owned folder without requiring administrator privileges.
Why ShareBeacon
If you mount NAS shares over SMB, you know the pattern: the Mac sleeps or hops to another Wi-Fi network, and the share silently drops. Remounting by hand and rebuilding your Finder sidebar is tedious.
ShareBeacon runs quietly in the menu bar, watches for reconnects, and mounts your shares automatically. Mount operations are serialized, endpoints are readiness-checked before mounting, and no telemetry or analytics are used.
Security
Passwords are stored as generic-password Keychain items and passed to NetFS in process memory. The SMB URL contains only the host and share name. Share configuration is stored in UserDefaults without passwords.