New Update Spacedrive: An open-source, cross-platform, File Manager powered by VDFS for Cloud Storage

[Ink]

Spacedrive is under active development, we are in the alpha stage and some features might be missing or disabled in the official release downloads.

Spacedrive — A file manager from the future.

Combine your drives and clouds into one database that you can organize and explore from any device. Designed for creators, hoarders and the painfully disorganized.

www.spacedrive.com

Announcement: October '23 Alpha Release

Download​

Changelog: Releases · spacedriveapp/spacedrive

What is a VDFS?​

A VDFS (virtual distributed filesystem) is a filesystem designed to work across a variety of storage layers. With a uniform API to manipulate and access content across many devices, VDFS is not restricted to a single machine. It achieves this by maintaining a virtual index of all storage locations, synchronizing the database between clients in realtime. This implementation also uses CAS (Content-addressable storage) to uniquely identify files, while keeping record of logical file paths relative to the storage locations.

The first implementation of a VDFS can be found in this UC Berkeley paper by Haoyuan Li. This paper describes its use for cloud computing, however the underlying concepts can be translated to open consumer software.

Motivation​

Many of us have multiple cloud accounts, drives that aren’t backed up and data at risk of loss. We depend on cloud services like Google Photos and iCloud, but are locked in with limited capacity and almost zero interoperability between services and operating systems. Photo albums shouldn’t be stuck in a device ecosystem, or harvested for advertising data. They should be OS agnostic, permanent and personally owned. Data we create is our legacy, that will long outlive us—open source technology is the only way to ensure we retain absolute control over the data that defines our lives, at unlimited scale.

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Upcoming features​

• Cloud support (Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, etc.)
• Drag and drop, and selection history
• Multi-device connectivity with peer-to-peer sync
• Spacedrop (AirDrop-like experience with end-to-end encrypted internet transfer)
• Location backup and sync between devices and clouds
• File sharing via Spaces
• File versioning
• Encryption key manager
• File encryption and encrypted containers
• Extensions
• Custom themes
• Tabs and dual-pane view
• More supported file types for Quick Preview and thumbnails
• Machine learning for face detection, video transcription, automatic labeling, and more

...and much more!

 

[Ink]

Downloads (Alpha): Releases · spacedriveapp/spacedrive

Highlights

1. Enhanced Thumbnail Generation:
Thumbnails are now generated more efficiently through optimized multi-threading, utilizing available resources for faster performance.

2. Job Progress Uninterrupted:
Jobs are enhanced with a step timeout feature, eliminating the issue of jobs getting stuck.

3. Location Onboarding Flow:
A streamlined onboarding flow for quicker and simpler location additions has been introduced.

4. In-App Changelog:
The in-app changelog is now linked to GitHub releases for real-time update tracking.

5. Improved MacOS Full-Screen Experience:
The MacOS window bar issue has been resolved for a cleaner full-screen view.

6. Customizable P2P Connections:
Options to enable or disable P2P and configure port settings are now available.