Welcome, astronauts

File Orbit is preparing for takeoff 🚀🪐

It brings me great joy to share our first post from File Orbit.

I'm Stephen Traiforos. I am the creator of File Orbit. Glad to have you aboard.

What is File Orbit?

File Orbit is private family storage. Keep photos, videos, and important files in more than one home you trust: your house, a parent's house, a sibling's desktop, and other places you choose.

Your devices already have internet. So why should a cloud company be the only place your history lives?

Share space on hardware you control with family and friends. Sharing is on purpose: an album or a folder, not your whole library.

What about the cloud?

We offer cloud storage as a safety-net.

Your Windows gaming PC or school MacBook can serve files from home. When a machine sleeps, goes offline, or fails, the safety-net is there for the copies you chose to keep with us.

We replicate those optional copies so precious moments are not betting on one address. Today we run safety-net capacity in North America. Next we plan South America and Asia: distinct regions, so distance and outages are less scary.

How do you join?

We are in closed alpha. Open beta is planned for the coming month.

What we are (and are not)

We are not trying to out-subsidize Google, Apple, Dropbox, or OneDrive on cheap bulk gigabytes. This is a small shop. We cannot match big-cloud storage pricing, and we will not pretend to.

What we can offer:

We will not make you the product

Copies in homes you trust first

Optional multi-region safety-net when you want it

Honest pricing when cloud capacity is paid

Sign-in and cost

If you have your own hardware and do not need our cloud storage, home-to-home sync is effectively free: bring your own Bluesky (or other AT Protocol) login.

Prefer us to run your File Orbit login? You can pay for that. We maintain it and keep security and updates current.

Under the hood (if you're curious)

File Orbit is built on AT Protocol (the same family of tech as Bluesky) and a private Interplanetary File System (IPFS) network. For how the sausage is made, see the nerd-focused posts on The intergalactic web.