In order to use S3Drive you need to register a free S3 compatible account at the provider of your choice. You'd then need to set it up, that is create a "bucket" and generate the API keys. Given you have it all, you either use a web client or download an S3Drive client on a platform of your choice, be it desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), mobile (Android, iOS) and use the previously generated API keys.

If you have trouble setting it up or you're a non-technical person, don't worry. Please contact us at support@s3drive.app or visit our Discord channel, so we or our community can assist you.

S3Drive is a complete, self-contained client which is 100% compatible with the open and broadly supported S3 protocol. There is no server or middle-man. That means that we're providing you the clients and it's up to you to decide where you want to manage your data. You can register a free account, you can pay for additional storage or you may decide to host S3 on your own using e.g. MinIO, SeaweedFS or Garage.

We're running a technical preview of managed S3 accounts, so you can try it out and start your privacy conscious journey with less friction. Managed accounts will be ready to use with different storage plans later this year.

We're providing a privacy friendly file management tools available for anyone regardless of their financial status. We truly believe that privacy is one of the crucial human rights and everyone deserves to have it. We are already providing a generous package for free which is subsidized by users who decided to support us by choosing our Pro offerings.
Staying compliant with S3 is not a trivial task, however by doing so we can provide a solution which is open, compatible with multiple providers and without a vendor lock-in. Since S3 wasn't designed entirely with an E2E encrypted file system in mind, we're providing an optional convenience layers to further improve user experience.

We've excluded advertisement from our business model, so you can be sure we'll never sell your data... and with our operational model we have very limited abilities to gather any data about you anyway.

Our short-term plan is to further improve S3Drive (roadmap) and improve its backup&sync capabilities, long-term plans include collaboration tools and encrypted email.

If you don't self-host your own back-end you never exactly know where your files are kept and who can see their contents. In order to protect your privacy you should enable E2E encryption which is entirely free and based on an open encryption protocol introduced by AWS. After enabling encryption your files are securely encrypted before leaving your device. Please be aware that after enabling the encryption you need to backup your encryption key, so you can access your files in an emergency or on a different device.

At the moment S3Drive isn't open source. Whilst we'd love to open-source our clients, given our design we would find it hard to build a sustainable model to finance future development. Our principles are based on a compatibility with an open S3 protocol, our encryption scheme is free and open-source. You're not forced to use our client and we're not making hard for you to simply move away to a different storage solution or an S3 client if you're not satisfied.

Don't get us wrong, open source is great, we love it, use and contribute ourselves.
Unfortunately the inherent flaw of open-source is funding. We all have families to feed and let me quote our Discord user: "GitHub stars don't pay rent."
I would love to work on an open-source full-time. The reality is that one needs to spend lots of time asking for money instead of building stuff.

You can say that there are many other solutions which are open-source and somehow manage to run a successful businesses and ... it's true. There is the other side of the story though. Most of these businesses have one thing in common, in order to bring profit they've usually had to lock you in into their closed-source back-end and proprietary protocols. Perhaps nothing wrong with that, but be aware that should they decide to wind down operations, you're left with an open-source puzzle which no longer fit into anything. We prefer to keep our ecosystem open even if it means that we need to do increase spendings in the area of verifiability, auditability and trust - open-source doesn't guarantee these either, but make them easier to achieve.

Nothing is definite though and things may change. We're actively exploring different operation models. At the very minimum we plan to give guarantees that if we were ever to wind down our operations, we would release our work under one of the open-source license be it GPLv3 or MIT.
Recently we've came across on some non-standard open-source alternatives, e.g.: n8n, BSL or faircode which aren't considered FOSS, but might work for S3Drive.
We would love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know at: opensource@s3drive.app or Discord.

You simply pay once and can use S3Drive with all its Pro features that were available at the time of purchase for as long as you want. If you've an active subscription you can immediately use any new features and improvements. For every continuous year of your subscription you receive new Pro features assigned to your perpetual license. If you decide to not extend subscription, you'll receive an access to all the features that you've gained the moment you've bought the subscription. Without valid subscription you will still receive bugfixes and security updates, however new features and certain improvements might not be available to you.

If you would like to buy the license only and skip the optional yearly updates, you can simply cancel the subscription just after buying.

We're not the first to use such model. We are inspired by JetBrains and we aim to use similar concept for S3Drive.

Depending on distro you will have to install additional packages. On Ubuntu/Debian please use:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y libfuse-dev libvlc-dev libjsoncpp-dev

We're not bundling static libraries to keep S3Drive lightweight.

Application relies on Visual C++ Redistributable which isn't always available.
Please download and install this package directly from Microsoft website.

This shall resolve below error:
The code execution cannot proceed because MSVCP140.dll was not found.
VCRUNTIME140.dll, VCRUNTIME140_1.dll

Something doesn't work as intended? Did you find a bug? Please contact us at support@s3drive.app or visit our Discord.
We might be able to address your issue on the fly.

We try our best to stay compatible with every S3 provider. Unfortunately each S3 provider is has slightly different S3 protocol implementations with its own quirks.

If something doesn't work for you as you'd expect, please don't give up.
We will be able to respond to your issue as long as you report it to us.
It really means a lot and helps us to improve S3Drive. Thanks !