Jamie Pine
3cfe8eaee6
macOS reaches the writable disk twice. /Users/me and /System/Volumes/Data/Users/me are the same directory joined by a firmlink, realpath does not resolve firmlinks, and FSEvents subscribes to exactly one of the two. Spacedrive resolves a source root through its volume's mount point, so the spelling it asks for is the one that does not work. The outbound half of that translation existed: watchable_spelling rewrote the path handed to FSEvents. The inbound half did not, so events came back in FSEvents' spelling and never matched a watched root. find_by_path missed and the watcher built a second tree beside the one the walk had already built. Both halves now live in one module. /usr/share/firmlinks publishes the mapping, so a watch resolves to a set of subscriptions, each carrying the prefix its events are rewritten back to. Above the watcher edge only one spelling exists, and the two calls to watchable_spelling in the ephemeral handler collapse back to comparing paths. A watch on the whole Data volume fans out. /System/Volumes/Data has no short spelling of its own, so it subscribes to each firmlink beneath it instead; this is Macintosh HD, which received nothing at all before. a_watch_on_the_long_spelling_delivers_under_it drives a real watch end to end. Both halves were checked by removing them: without the outbound rewrite nothing arrives, without the inbound one the path arrives in the wrong spelling. It watches a directory under $HOME because a temp directory will not do — /var/folders is reached through a symlink rather than a firmlink and FSEvents refuses its resolved spelling, which is a separate quirk.
Spacedrive
More space, from the drives you already have.
docs.spacedrive.com • Discord • Files • Getting Started • Status
Note
August 2026: Version v2.0.0-alpha.4 is out now!
Spacedrive is a lightweight, Rust native, file manager that connects your devices, drives and clouds into one virtual file system. Pool your storage capacity together and browse and search drives that aren't even plugged in.
Backed by a continiously updating, modular index. Spacedrive can walk all major file systems, extracting metadata and snapshotting drive state without touching the files.
Mount anything to your Mac or PC. Like screenshots shared between several computers, or a project with 10TB of raw footage shared with a team. File content streams from one device to another on-demand.
The mission
The file system has been the single most important part of computing from the start, but software has become increasingly dependent on cloud services at the cost of data ownership.
This is a software problem, Spacedrive is here to solve it.
Files
The file manager of that computer, built on an index that Spacedrive maintains continuously. The watcher feeds it as files change, so it is already current when you look — nothing is built on demand while you wait.
Every surface is a view over that one index: grid, list, columns, media, size, recents, search, knowledge. A size analysis of a folder and a photo grid of the same folder are the same data through a different lens, and each view opens current because the index already is.
- One address for everything. Every file has an
SdPath, whether it lives on this machine, another of your devices, or a cloud volume. Operations work the same across all of them. - Content identity. BLAKE3 hashing gives the same file on two machines the same fingerprint — the basis for deduplication and redundancy tracking across your machines.
- Cloud volumes as first-class storage. S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure Blob and GCS get indexed alongside local disks.
- P2P sync. Devices connect directly over Iroh and QUIC with no server in the middle. Metadata syncs, files stay where they are, and devices that are offline remain in the index.
- Search that works. SQLite FTS5 over files and archived records, roughly 55ms on a million entries, with indexing at around 8,500 files per second.
- Preview before commit. Copies, moves and deletes are simulated first, so you see conflicts and space changes before anything runs, and the operation becomes a durable job that survives restarts.
Files runs standalone: a desktop app on macOS, Windows and Linux, iOS and Android clients, a browser client, a headless server and a CLI. The macOS install is 44.4 MB with no bundled codecs and nothing to download. V2 is in alpha; the last stable download is v1.
It is machine-scoped by design. A host has one filesystem, so it gets one index, and everything else on the machine declares against that index as a capability instead of running an indexer of its own.
Search everything, not just files
Archive indexes external sources through script adapters, which puts email, notes, bookmarks and chat history in the same index as your files. Shipped adapters: Gmail, Apple Notes, Chrome Bookmarks, Chrome History, Safari History, Obsidian, OpenCode, Slack, macOS Contacts, macOS Calendar and GitHub.
Writing one means a directory with an adapter.toml and a script in any language
that reads stdin and prints lines. See
docs/archive/README.md.
Where V2 came from
2021. A personal project: one interface over files scattered across devices and cloud accounts, with content-addressed identity so the same file on two machines is the same file.
May 2022. Open sourced. Number one on GitHub Trending for three days, 10,000 stars in the first week, a $2M seed round, a team of around twelve.
Early 2025. 35,000 stars, 600,000 installs, and a codebase that could no
longer ship. The Rust Prisma client was deprecated with no migration path, libp2p
transfers hung in ways nobody could debug, and two incompatible file models meant
every operation needed writing twice.
docs/overview/history.mdx is the full post-mortem.
2025. V2, rebuilt solo against that list. SeaORM for Prisma, Iroh for libp2p,
one SdPath for every file, jobs down to about 50 lines each, and search that
actually searches.
2026. The subtraction. V2 fixed V1's engineering and kept its appetite: every install compiled in a WASM extension runtime and shipped a bundled media stack, on the theory that a file manager should carry its whole environment. It should not, and both became opt-in:
| macOS payload before | ~156 MB (73.2 MB binary plus an 83 MB framework) |
| Default install now | 44.4 MB, one file, nothing to download |
Nothing was removed from the product. The heavy subsystems became opt-in
features, macOS thumbnails route through ImageIO and QuickLook instead of bundled
FFmpeg and libheif, and half the old binary turned out to be data rather than
code. Every number is measured; the method is in
docs/plans/2026-07-29-install-size.md.
Status
Under active development, and in alpha. V2 is a rebuild rather than a patch, so treat everything below as moving.
| Files: indexing, sync, cloud volumes, desktop, mobile and web clients | working |
| Archive: record table, durable overlay, FTS5 search, 11 adapters | working |
| Machine-scoped daemon: supervision, health, lifecycle, port leases | working |
| Mounts: read-only share on loopback, byte-range peer protocol | in progress |
| Per-source stores and the in-memory read tier | in progress |
Architecture
spacedrive/
├── core/ # Rust engine (CQRS/DDD): indexing, sync, jobs, volumes
├── crates/ # archive, supervisor, task-system, crypto, imageio, images
├── apps/
│ ├── tauri/ mobile/ # Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux), React Native
│ ├── cli/ server/ # CLI, daemon, headless server
│ ├── native/ # GPUI client prototype
│ └── web/ # Browser client
├── packages/
│ ├── interface/ # Files' React UI
│ └── ts-client/ swift-client/ assets/
└── adapters/ # Script-based data source adapters
Every core operation — a file copy, a tag create, a search query — is a registered action or query with type-safe input and output, and Specta generates the TypeScript and Swift clients from those definitions.
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Engine | Rust, Tokio |
| Database | SQLite (SeaORM + sqlx) |
| Search | SQLite FTS5 |
| Content hashing | BLAKE3 |
| P2P | Iroh (QUIC, hole-punching, local discovery) |
| Cloud storage | OpenDAL (S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure Blob, GCS) |
| Cryptography | Ed25519, X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-GCM |
| Media | ImageIO and QuickLook on macOS, FFmpeg/libheif/Pdfium elsewhere |
| Desktop | Tauri 2 |
| Mobile | React Native + Expo |
| Frontend | React 19, Vite, TanStack Query, Tailwind CSS v4 |
| Design system | SpaceUI |
| Type generation | Specta (TypeScript + Swift) |
Getting Started
Requires Rust (stable, MSRV 1.81), Bun 1.3+, Node 20.x, and just.
git clone https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive
cd spacedrive
# System dependencies: cmake on macOS, GTK/WebKit/gstreamer on Linux.
# Pass `mobile` to also add the iOS/Android Rust targets.
./scripts/setup.sh # .\scripts\setup.ps1 on Windows
bun install
cargo run -p xtask -- setup
xtask setup writes .cargo/config.toml, builds the release daemon, and registers
the cargo xtask, cargo daemon and cargo cli aliases, so after the first run
just setup does the same thing in one command. It downloads nothing.
On macOS that is everything you need. Thumbnails for video, HEIC, RAW and PDF come
from ImageIO and QuickLook, the same system codecs Finder uses. Elsewhere those
formats need the prebuilt codec bundle (FFmpeg, libheif, Pdfium), which is a 91 MB
download and enables the ffmpeg and heif features:
cargo run -p xtask -- setup --native-deps
Run Files
just dev-desktop # desktop app (builds and starts the daemon for you)
just dev-server # headless server + web UI
just dev-mobile # Expo dev server
Test and check
just test # cargo test --workspace
just check # cargo fmt --check + clippy
Python 3.9+ is needed at runtime by the bundled adapters, not to build Spacedrive.
Contributing
- Join Discord to chat with developers and community
- Contributing Guide
- Archive & Adapters, how data source adapters work
- SpaceUI, shared design system
License
Releases before 2026-03-24 were published under AGPL-3.0 and remain available under that license.