FAQ


In order to use S3Drive you need to register a free S3 compatible account, there are plenty providers to choose from. You'll then need to set it up, that is create an S3 "bucket" and generate the API keys. Once you're done, you need to install S3Drive on mobile, desktop or use the web client, so you can connect using the previously generated API keys.

If you have trouble setting it up, don't worry. Please visit our Support 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 connect in order to manage your data. You can register a free tier account and pay only for additional storage that you've used. If you've the skills or courage you may decide to host S3 on your own using e.g. MinIO, Ceph, Garage HQ, SeaweedFS or Swift.


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 paid 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 with E2E encryption in mind, we've combined it with Rclone crypt and provide it to you as a convenient package with a modern UI and seamless 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 make it as seamless to use as if encryption wasn't there. Long-term plans include collaboration tools, support for different clouds, improved background processing and encrypted email.


Normally, if you don't self-host your own back-end you never exactly know where your files are kept and who has access to your valuable data.
Since S3Drive uses zero knowledge end-to-end encryption, hosting your own back-end is no longer required to keep your data private.
This is because your data gets encrypted before leaving your device, in such way that back-end never see the original context.

In order to protect your privacy you need to enable E2E encryption which is entirely free and based on an open encryption protocol introduced by Rclone. 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.


Currently S3Drive isn't open source. Whilst we'd love to open-source our clients, given our design we would find it hard to maintain current development tempo and finance project maintenance. Our principles are based on a compatibility with an open S3 protocol, our encryption scheme is free and open-source. We're not forcing you to use our client and we're providing a guide how to setup Rclone, so you can conveniently import/export your data.

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 the rent."
As a tech-founder, I would love to work on an open-source initiatives 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 couple 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 fits into anything. We prefer to keep the whole ecosystem open, which comes with its own unique challenges - we need to work harder in the area of verifiability, auditability and trust. Open-source doesn't guarantee these either, but it is a tool which makes them easier to achieve, plus OSS gets free marketing that we don't.

Nothing is definite though and things are likely to change in the future. We understand importance of open-source in a privacy domain. We're actively exploring different operation and financing models. At the very minimum we plan to give guarantees that if we were ever (very unlikely) to discontinue the project, we would release our work to public domain 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 be a fair compromise between S3Drive community needs and business viability.
We would love to hear your thoughts. Do you have an idea how we can get closer towards open-source? Please contact us at: Support or Feedback.


This error is related to AppImage format requirement. On Ubuntu/Debian please use:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y libfuse2

Additionally you may have to install MPV video libraries:
sudo apt-get install -y libmpv1


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 Support channel.
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 !