Spacedrive – file manager powered by a virtual distributed filesystem

In Operation

Spacedrive offers the traditional icon grid and list views. There’s also a media view which we’re showing in the image below. This mode lets you preview your multimedia (images and videos). Of course, we’re showing a collection of penguin images…

There’s functionality to let you tag files and folders with labels. The software created keepsafe, hidden, projects, and memes tags, and you can, of course, create your own.

Spacedrive creates and maintains its own metadata database by indexing your existing storage locations, extracting metadata and fingerprinting the byte data. This can be CPU intensive depending on the amount of media needed to index, but the approach has the virtue that once the indexing is complete, search and retrieval is quicker.

Summary

Spacedrive is a decentralized cross platform app that aims to let you manage files across all devices, drives and clouds at once. It’s targeted at creative people who media stream, photographers and film-makers.

As things stand, Spacedrive is lacking core functionality to achieve these aims. For example, realtime library synchronization and cloud integration are not implemented yet. But these features are next to be added according to the developers’ roadmap. And there are many other awesome features planned such as a media encoder, hosted spaces, and encrypted vaults.

The project looks extremely interesting. Would we recommend you use Spacedrive as your main media file manager? No, absolutely not. With a file manager, you really want it to be stable and polished. That’s not the case with Spacedrive. But it’s the most interesting file manager we’ve seen for a long time.

Spacedrive is definitely a project we’ll track. It’s impressive roadmap may also explain why it’s amassed so many GitHub stars (over 27,000 stars at the time of writing). Many people star a project simply because it’s a way of monitoring progress, rather than indicative that they are using the software as a daily driver.

Website: www.spacedrive.com
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Spacedrive Technology Inc.
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

Spacedrive is written in TypeScript and Rust. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary