peerdrive splits, encrypts, and scatters your files across a network of peers. No company sits between you and your data, and no single machine holds enough of it to matter.
peerdrive is a distributed storage network in the same family as IPFS or Storj: every participant is a requester (someone storing files), a provider (someone offering spare disk space), or both at once. There's no central server holding your files — just a mesh of ordinary machines, each holding an encrypted piece of the whole.
Your passphrase never leaves your device, and neither does anything readable. Files are chunked and encrypted before a single byte goes anywhere, so the peers storing your data — and the network coordinator that helps them find each other — only ever handle ciphertext.
A provider never sees plaintext. It only ever stores and serves back what it was given: unreadable blocks with no idea what they belong to.
Your file is broken into fixed 1 MiB pieces, the same size whether it's a photo or a video.
Each piece is encrypted on your machine with a key derived from your passphrase via scrypt. Nothing readable is ever sent.
Every encrypted chunk is named by the SHA-256 hash of its own ciphertext — addressed by content, not by location.
Chunks are pushed to multiple provider peers and tracked individually, so one peer going offline doesn't cost you the file.
Reading a file checks your local cache first, then pulls any missing chunk from whichever connected peer holds it.