File Manager

Spacedrive: A Futuristic File Manager For Your Desktop and Mobile

Hazem Abbas

Jul 10, 2023 — 3 min read

Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file manager, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem (VDFS) written in Rust.

Spacedrive is the ultimate file management solution for anyone who wants to organize and manage their files across multiple devices in one place. With VDFS, Spacedrive creates a personal distributed cloud that is secure and intuitive to use. Spacedrive is also open-source, which means that you can customize and modify it to suit your needs.

It allows you to organize files across many devices in one place. From cloud services to offline hard drives, Spacedrive combines the storage capacity and processing power of your devices into one personal distributed cloud, that is both secure and intuitive to use.

Beyond being an opinionated, swiss army knife file explorer, Spacedrive is a personal database. It identifies your files uniquely, understanding more file types than any operating system.

Create photo albums that you'll never lose, effortlessly catalogue terabytes of video, move files between devices dynamically to optimize space and redundancy, generate preview media for easy viewing, automate security and encryption—the list goes on.

A decentralized, local-first design optimizes for privacy, security and data ownership—and best of all, its open source and entirely free.

For independent creatives, hoarders and those that want to own their digital footprint, Spacedrive provides a free file management experience like no other.

Spacedrive is currently a work in progress, and it will be released soon, you can join the waiting list or build the app from scratch.

Features

Fancy user-friendly informative interface
Clean icon
Create file spaces
Generate thumbnails
File viewer
File finder with advanced search
Create and manage photo albums
Manage jobs
Add cloud locations or local folders
Organize file and folder in tags.

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.