I have a laptop, a phone, and an old desktop at home. Between them, terabytes of storage. And yet my phone was permanently full, and the "solution" everyone reaches for is the same: pay a monthly subscription to keep my own files on someone else's computer.
That never sat right with me. I already own the storage, I just couldn't use it well. So I started building HomiDrive: turn a computer you already own into a private home cloud, without a NAS, without renting storage, and without handing your files to a third party.
Why not just use X?
I tried the obvious things first:
- Cloud storage (Dropbox/Drive/iCloud): pay forever, files live on their servers, you're the product. The exact thing I wanted to avoid.
- A NAS: great, but it's a box to buy, configure, and maintain, overkill when I already have a desktop that's on most of the day.
- Nextcloud / self-hosting: powerful, but it's a server. Reverse proxies, Docker, certs, updates. I didn't want a second job.
- Syncthing: brilliant for sync; but it's sync, not "browse my drive from my phone," and setup isn't exactly grandma-friendly.
- LocalSend / Snapdrop: perfect for one-off sends, but no persistent drive you can browse and reach later.
Each solved a slice. None was "use the storage I already own, keep it private, and still reach it from anywhere; simply."
What HomiDrive is
Pick a folder on your computer; it becomes your private drive. Pair your phone over Wi-Fi to browse it, upload to it, and pull from it. Need to send a big file to another device in the room? Quick Transfer pushes it directly, device to device, at full LAN speed. Away from home? Remote access reaches the same drive over an encrypted, owner-only connection.
Design principles I kept coming back to:
- Completely local —> no servers. Your files live only on your computer. There's no server in the middle holding your data; I never see it or store it.
- Normal files, normal folders. No app database, no proprietary blobs; your files stay ordinary files on disk. Open, move, or back them up with or without HomiDrive. No lock-in.
- Zero setup. No NAS, no port forwarding, no router config. Install, sign in, pick a folder.
- Reachable anywhere. The part most local tools skip; get to your own drive when you leave the house, without exposing it to the internet.
How it works
- Desktop is Tauri: a Rust host with a React UI. The Rust side runs a small local HTTPS API over the storage folder, an mDNS advertiser, and the file-transfer peer service. Native, tiny binary, no Electron.
- Android is bare React Native with native Kotlin modules for what JS can't do well: Storage Access Framework, streaming uploads/downloads over a pinned TLS client, foreground transfer notifications, and the transfer peer.
- Trust model: the LAN is treated as untrusted. Each device gets its own revocable credential, and clients pin the desktop's TLS certificate; a mutable LAN IP never identifies the server; the pinned cert does.
- Transfers are resumable and verified end-to-end with a whole-file SHA-256 before the receiver commits. Interrupted sends resume from the last received byte.
- Remote rides an embedded WireGuard-based overlay (official engine behind app-owned adapters); a managed sidecar on desktop, an app-scoped VPN on Android. Owner-only, no port forwarding, and the same paired credential + cert pin authorize every path (LAN, direct, or relayed). Files are never stored on the relay; it just forwards encrypted traffic.
Signing in (Google, for now) is identity only; it links your devices and enables Remote. It never gives anyone access to your files; those stay authorized locally by the paired credential.
The honest bits
- Everything local is free. The only paid piece is Remote access, because it's the only part with real infrastructure cost. If a direct connection cannot be established then relay has costs.
- It's pre-launch Windows and Android first, macOS/iOS later.
Where it's at
I'm keeping a waitlist while I get Drive solid. If "use the storage you already own instead of renting someone else's" resonates, you can join at homidrive.app.
Two things I'd love this community's take on:
- What's actually kept you from ditching cloud storage for hardware you already own, was it setup, trust, remote access, something else?
- If you self-host today: what would make you trust a closed-source tool here, or is that a dealbreaker?
