SAFE Drive - access SAFE storage on your local drive

One man on a boat and a ton of insight. It is like watching a new nebula forming. Great stuff, truly great stuff and fun, the most important part, it’s fun that can potentially help millions of people. They may never know, but these are the things that will change lives and do so quietly and without need for accolades, but we know so we can say thank you Mark :beers: have one on us and wet that dry dock :+1:

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Huge props to you @happybeing I’m constantly telling people THIS is the most important community project and I mean it whole heartedly, and also to you @JPL I’ve seen you put in so much effort into constantly learning, whether it’s on the solid forum, or helping Mark with testing on the dev forum. Great effort from both of you. We’re a lucky lot to have you fellas!

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If you want to dive in and help with testing, or just want to try SAFE Drive out privately I’ve written a short post to get you started (also see how you can try it out on MacOS and Windows):

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Nice to see yah doing some serious heavy dev lifting on some tools and ideas that will make the launch of SafeNet awesome. Would love to help dev some if I get spare time, but lately job work consumes my everything :confused: . Anyways cheers, maybe by network launch time these things can be hardened and very reliable, get a few really good web designers to build the UI Safe site for these apps and we can be off to the races with some really visually appealing and demo’able SAFE sites running on the network. Would make for some great promotion tools.

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Amazing work @happybeing. I should hopefully have time during thanksgivings day tomorrow to test it out. Very excited. Safe Drive will help many projects

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Super effort @happybeing :star_struck: !!

Will be watching this space.

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The Future

I won’t be able to continue this level of effort much longer, and had some (good) news yesterday that puts some time limits on this.

So I’m really keen to help anyone who might be interested in getting into the code, or various other ways of working directly on SAFE Drive and/or SafenetworkJs, which it relies on. This might be around testing, documentation, writing some scripts, writing a how to article etc.

Many different things really, so not just for coders, and if anyone wants to learn a bit of code I will help.

I will also not just disappear! I love doing this stuff and this code will be much easier for me to understand and modify than somebody else, because I wrote it. So I’ll still be working on it, or helping others doing what they are working on.

But there’s a need and an opportunity here, because if it is only me, it will be hard to make this a usable product, and limit how useful it can become.

So enquiries welcome, or just start with helping out a bit and see how that goes. But if anyone fancies getting more involved, the door is open!

Update on ways to help

Things are going well as noted in this week’s SAFE Dev update

For anyone who has a little time to try it out, or help explore ideas for how to use it, such as decentralised github or Dropbox, please see the following post for ideas and how to get involved:

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Hey guys looking for responses here.

In terms of Safe Drive, we obviously don’t see it as being “hosted” on the Safe Network. So what word do we use to describe the way Safe Drive is kept on the network?

This is relevant to other projects also.

If the word you think of is not in the list just add it.

Cheers.

  • Hosted
  • Gateway
  • Portal
  • Displayed
  • Animated
  • Swarm/swarming/swarmed
  • Huddle/huddling/huddled
  • Cluster/clustering/clustered

0 voters

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I think the usual way to describe it would be a virtual drive mounted on your operating system of choice.

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Yea, its a mounted drive, like but better than a USB drive that a lot of people use to access more files than their 128GB or 200GB laptop gives them.

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Linked makes sense to me. It isn’t on your PC nor is it in a central location.

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SAFE Drive is one of the services on the SAFE Network. Acting as a drive can be a service of the network.

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I am for mounted too. It is good to stick to commonly accepted words. It does so much more, but from the perspective of the end user it is mounted linked virtual drive :stuck_out_tongue:

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The SAFE drive is mounted on your local machine, but IMO is well described as a distributed file system with respect to the network. Considering the chunking aspect, the network itself might be casually described as a fault tolerant distributed block storage device.

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The mounted drive has been “Safe’d” :-).

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I agree that distributed is a useful concept to include. Drive implies the thing is a singular thing, which it may be to all intents and purposes. Hive might convey the idea that the drive is distributed and networked. Also, Drive doesn’t really convey anything of the idea of sharding, while hive, containing the idea of multiple cells can at least give some sort of image of a distributed, networked drive containing sharded data.

Useful suggestions there. I’m not keen on changing the name, the point being to keep that short, simple and that people will probable find SAFE and know a bit about that first, and on seeing SAFE Drive realise it makes SAFE storage convenient, accessible as a disk drive.

Maybe we should rework the github readme so the introduction mentions DFS or something like that early on?

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I sort of agree. My difficulties are that if you build a new type of network with a new type of architecture, it is sometimes confusing to use words that refer to the old architecture and eventually a new vocabulary will probably emerge.Maybe the github readme is not the place to emphasize it. I was thinking of less technically minded users who will probably not be referencing info there. If distribution and sharding are the architectural methods used to ensure data privacy they should certainly be emphasized, in my opinion.

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I don’t disagree - and I think SAFE Network is the place to do that. Most people will encounter that before SAFE Drive. At the same time, it is a fair point to use descriptions of SAFE Drive in a way that supports that.

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But not in the expense of approachability. I’d like SAFE apps, programs etc. to be named according to their functions rather than according to the technology behind them. That way we less technical people can use them more instinctively when coming from oldnet. It will certainly lead to some sillyness such as DNG -file format in photography. DNG means Digital NeGative, which is very misleading in technical sense, but ok from functional point of view.

And because people must pay for uploading, they must have some familiarity with SAFE in general, so I’d say there is not that much need for explanations.

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