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Connect an AI Assistant (MCP)

Updated July 14, 2026

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. You point your assistant at Hiberden's MCP connector, a small companion program called hiberden-mcp, and from then on the assistant can read your catalog. There is no account and no API key involved, and connecting it moves no data off your machine.

What it can do

By default the connector is read and verify only: eleven tools in all. Ten of them read the catalog (projects, archives, Collections, the coverage roll-up, archive detail, destinations, tapes, tape detail, recent activity, and file search). The eleventh, 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

The quick way

Run the setup command once and it wires up the assistants it finds:

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.

By hand

Every MCP client uses the same mcpServers block. Add Hiberden to it and point command at the hiberden-mcp program. The env block is optional: include HIBERDEN_DB only if your catalog lives somewhere other than the default location, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Hiberden\catalog.db.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hiberden": {
      "command": "C:/path/to/hiberden-mcp.exe",
      "env": { "HIBERDEN_DB": "C:/path/to/catalog.db" }
    }
  }
}

Where that block lives depends on the client:

  • Claude Desktop: claude_desktop_config.json
  • Claude Code: .mcp.json in your project
  • Cursor and Windsurf: the same mcpServers shape in their settings

Save, restart the assistant, and ask it how your coverage looks.

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 level in Settings, then MCP in the desktop app:

  • Read-only (the default): look and verify, change nothing.
  • Archive: also organize the catalog, create projects and Collections, rename, and re-file.
  • Full: also change protection, set up destinations and policies.

Deleting is always off unless you deliberately turn it on. Every change an assistant makes is written to an audit trail you can read in the app, and a tool above the level you have set is neither offered to the assistant nor accepted.

What stays on your machine

  • In its default mode the connector makes no network requests. It never sends your catalog to Hiberden or to anyone else.
  • 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 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.

New to the ideas behind the answers? See Reading coverage status and Verified 3-2-1 Archiving.