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jkloetzke edited this page Sep 5, 2012 · 9 revisions

Welcome to PeerDrive, a new approach to file systems.

What is PeerDrive

PeerDrive is a open source filing system to securely store, organize, share and sync your files from everywhere. At it’s core it is a new, sightly more database like file system model, in contrast to the known path based, hierarchical file systems. It is built on a purely distributed peer-to-peer data model and will be a perfect solution when you need your data on different devices in different locations without relying on a permanent network connection or central infrastructure.

PeerDrive provides seamless file versioning and backup so that you will never lose any work you did. It builds on the fact that versioning and backup are two sides of the same coin. While versioning (or revision control) typically is meant for single documents the term backup is used for keeping snapshot versions of many documents on a separate volume. PeerDrive combines both to a single, coherent solution. In fact it doesn’t even matter if the backup is in the cloud, on a network volume, on a local disk or all of them at once.

By going beyond POSIX file systems PeerDrive allows you to annotate and organize the data how you like it. It supports arbitrary, non-hierarchical organization schemes with durable linking, even across volumes. PeerDrive allows extensible annotation of files with tags, comments, ratings or any other user defined field.

Being distributed at its core PeerDrive allows collaborating on shared files. They can be accessed and changed online and offline. People can work simultaneously on the same files, even while being disconnected from the shared drive and later merge their data if the file versions have diverged.

What it is not

PeerDrive is neither of the following:

  • Ready for productive use (well, not yet).
  • Some kind of distributed rsync. Rsync synchronizes existing file systems while PeerDrive is a new file system model.
  • A semantic desktop model. PeerDrive could provide the persistence layer, though, but is currently missing a query language.
  • A new SCM / version control system.

Getting started

Further information