I have just installed the official Launcher and the Demo app on a windows 7 box.
I could find no obvious configuration for this critical aspect of using this system.
After lots of reading I finally found a vague reference to a virtual drive here
https://safenetwork.wiki/en/Vaults_(What_it_is)
I see no such drive on my PC.
I would appreciate anyone’s efforts to explain whats actually going on using very concrete, specific details for windows 7 if possible.
Thanks
The data is not stored on your PC. There will be a config file (small text) to connect to boostrap nodes. All data is stored on the network. IF you run a vault you will store soem of that data in small encrypted and obfuscated chunks. This is how you earn safecoin (not yet though).
So SAFE client software stores it’s data on the network.
Thanks dirvine.
Obviously I was working from incorrect assumptions as regards how the system works today. The end-goal is well explained in the docs, it just didn’t match up with my experience of the Launcher & Demo.
Which made me a little wary of continuing but I’m happy to try them out further as-is bearing in mind its apparently in some sort of testing stage.
I would recommend making this much more explicitly clear on the very pretty landing page. At least test onboarding experience with a few novices and distributed/p2p/f2f fans who have near zero experience of your specific project.
I did understand that the “cryptocoin for use of your pc/server-farm resources” feature was not active as yet.
Does this mean that currently, all the storage on the network is being provided centrally by the project itself as opposed to any “users” like myself ? If so can you share any details on that from a techical or juristicional pov? ie did ye just rent a bunch of US aws storage or is it all on a monster server in someones garage in Glasglow. 
Thanks again for the prompt response and good luck with this amazing project.
No worries 
At the moment all the vaults are on digital ocean boxes on their network. It’s no hassle though as vaults cannot decrypt data or similar, they could see IP addresses of clients though. We do weekly updates which keeps people up to speed. We did run home based vaults but too many weaker nodes joined and caused data loss etc. Atm we are including some checks and balances in the nodes to allow vaults from home.
Hope this helps a bit and thanks for the support, it really is important to us all in the community folks like you are around.