Hiberden speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open, vendor-neutral standard for connecting AI assistants to tools and data. Connect it once and an assistant you already use, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Cursor, can answer questions straight from your live catalog: what you have, where each copy lives, and which archives are actually verified.
Do I need to set it up?
Yes, once. Nothing connects on its own. Since 1.1.0 the connector, a small companion program called hiberden-mcp, ships inside the app itself, so there is nothing extra to download. There is no account and no API key involved, and in its default mode the connector makes no network requests of its own. It works from your catalog: it can tell an assistant what you have and where each copy lives, but it never hands the contents of your archived files to the assistant.
What it can do
By default the connector is read and verify only: fourteen tools in all. Thirteen of them read the catalog: projects, archives, Collections, the coverage roll-up, archive detail, destinations, tapes, tape detail, recent activity, file search, the file list inside an archive, job history, and catalog statistics. The fourteenth, verify_copy, does something the others cannot: it re-reads a copy off its actual medium, re-hashes it, and compares the result to the archive's recorded SHA-256 before it will report Verified. So even a confused or manipulated assistant cannot invent a "Verified" result; the answer comes from the medium, not from a stored flag.
Ask it things like:
- "What is my 3-2-1 coverage right now?"
- "Which archives aren't fully protected, and what are they missing?"
- "Where does the file A001_C003.R3D live across my copies?"
- "Verify the tape copy of my BeachShoot Day 1 archive."
Connect it
From the app
Open Settings, then MCP in the desktop app. If you use Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Windsurf, click Connect Claude Desktop: one click wires Hiberden into Claude Desktop, and into Cursor and Windsurf too if they are installed.
For any other MCP client, click Copy config to put the ready-made mcpServers snippet on your clipboard, then paste it into your client's configuration. For Claude Code that is .mcp.json in your project; other clients take the same mcpServers shape in their settings.
Save, restart the assistant, and ask it how your coverage looks.
From the command line
The button in Settings, then MCP is the easiest route, but the same installer is also a command-line tool for scripted or reviewed setups. The hiberden-mcp program sits next to the Hiberden app executable and is not added to your PATH, so run it from that folder or by its full path (in PowerShell, prefix it with .\):
hiberden-mcp install
This detects Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Windsurf and writes the connection into each one. To review the change before applying it yourself, run hiberden-mcp install --print and paste the snippet by hand. hiberden-mcp uninstall removes the entry again.
You decide how much it can do
Permission is a setting in Hiberden, not something the assistant can grant itself. The connector starts at read-only, and you raise the "Access level" in Settings, then MCP:
- Read-only (the default): look and verify, change nothing.
- Archive: also organize the catalog: create projects and Collections, rename, and move archives.
- Full: also change protection: create local and NAS destinations, create policies, add or remove bindings, assign policies, and retire destinations.
Cloud destinations and their credentials can never be created through the connector. Those are entered in the desktop app only, so secrets never reach an assistant.
Deleting is a separate switch (Settings, then MCP, then Advanced), off by default and effective only at Full. Even then, a delete only forgets catalog records; nothing ever erases bytes from your media, and a delete that would orphan other records is refused.
Tools above the level you have set are hidden from the assistant and refused if called. Every write and every refusal is logged to an append-only audit trail shown in Settings, then MCP (when, who, operation, detail, result). Entries stay readable even after the item they touched is gone.
What stays on your machine
- The connector runs locally over stdio. In its default mode it makes no network requests. It never sends your catalog to Hiberden or to anyone else.
- Your archived files stay put. A verify does read a copy's bytes off its medium to re-hash them, but that happens locally; only the pass or fail result goes back to the assistant. File contents are never returned to it.
- Your cloud keys and credentials are entered only in Hiberden itself. The connector never sees them, so there is nothing there to leak.
- The assistant brings its own language model. The connector holds no model and no API key of its own.
One thing is not local: the assistant itself. What you type to it, and the tool results it receives back (archive names, coverage counts, verify outcomes), may be sent to that assistant's provider and handled under that vendor's privacy policy, not Hiberden's. Choose your assistant with that in mind.
The connector has its own short privacy policy at /mcp/privacy.
One caveat worth knowing: cloud (S3) read-back verification runs inside the Hiberden desktop app, not through the connector. Ask an assistant to verify a cloud copy and it will tell you the check happens in the app. That is a "not attempted here" answer, not a failure.