📎Drives and BanyanFS

BanyanFS is our data wallet, which is at the core of all Banyan's tech. It's crucial to how we made decentralized file storage work in our app.

How BanyanFS works

BanyanFS builds on and refines prior art in distributed data storage to provide end-to-end encryption without sacrificing collaboration and user control. For an overview, see End-to-end Encryption.

A BanyanFS file system consists of a segment containing metadata as well as a content payload with hierarchically-encrypted data sections so that file shares are secure and granular. If you'd like to know more about how encryption works, check out Encryption (technical).

It also uses a signed, versioned journal for audited editing and historical rollback. You can read more about those features in Journaling and Versioning.

Drives

A Drive is a representation of a single BanyanFS file system. It's associated with the data itself, not a physical device, and is usually backed by both a local copy and one or more remote copies. It uses Content Addressing to keep track of what it is and find where its data is stored. You can manage your Drives in our web interface where you can browse and modify your files, as well as from the command line using our CLI app.

Creating a Drive

You can create drives from our web interface. See more info here: Creating a Drive

Organizing your Projects

We recommend that you approximately map one drive to one collaborative project or app. This is the use case we're designing for, at least. Personal in one, one per workplace team, etc.

This may be subject to change as we keep working on the product 😄