Storage and drives

Libraries

A library is one storage root. There can be several at once:

Each shows its own used, free, and total space. Total and free are read live from the operating system on every request, never cached, because a stale number for disk space is actively misleading. Used is a running counter updated in the same transaction as the write that changed it.

One library is marked Default and receives new top level uploads.

Libraries never span

A folder's library is fixed when it is created, and everything inside inherits it. A folder never spans two libraries. This is what keeps the object store simple: each library owns exactly one objects/ directory and nothing references across a boundary.

Moving within a library is the cheap metadata only operation. Moving to a different library is a real copy then delete, shown with progress like any other background job, never silently instant.

Quotas

Per account, in bytes. Zero means unlimited, which is the sensible default on your own hardware.

The check happens at upload creation time, before a single byte is accepted, so an over quota upload is refused immediately rather than after a long transfer. The counter is transactional; a periodic pass recalculates it as a correctness check rather than as the hot path.

What the storage figures in the sidebar mean

Two numbers sit at the bottom of the sidebar, and they are deliberately measuring different things.

Used is your own files, and nobody else's. It is the total size of the files this account owns, counted from the account's own rows and nothing wider. It is not what Local Drive is storing in total, and it is certainly not what the machine's disk is holding. Two people on the same server see two different used figures, and one of them filling their share never makes the other person's number move.

Free is the disk, which everyone shares. There is one pool of space and every account draws from it, so this figure is the same for everybody and it moves whenever anybody uploads or deletes. It is what the disk can still accept, not a share reserved for you.

That is also why the sidebar never shows the disk's total size. A 500 GB drive is mostly the operating system and everything else on the machine; presenting it as Local Drive's capacity would be meaningless. The bar is drawn against your used plus what is actually still available, so it answers "how close am I to not being able to upload" rather than "how full is this computer".

When you have a quota

The space you can still use is the smaller of two limits: what is left of your quota, and what is left on the disk.

A 100 GB quota is not 100 GB of headroom when the disk has 2 GB left. In that situation the sidebar shows 2 GB and says the disk is lower than your quota, because the alternative is a number that promises space the server cannot give you.

Lowering an account's quota below what it already stores is allowed, and shows as full with zero remaining rather than as a negative figure. Nothing is deleted; that account simply cannot add more until it is under the new limit or the limit is raised.

What an admin sees

An ordinary account sees its own usage and the shared free space. Nothing else.

Settings, Users gives an admin the server-wide view: every account with how much it is storing, and its quota where one is set. That is what answers "who filled the disk", which is not a question anyone can answer from their own figure alone.

Settings, Storage gives the other half: each library, its total size, and what is free on it.

This is a size, not a look inside

An admin sees how much an account stores. An admin does not see what it stores.

There is no admin file browser, no way to open somebody else's folder, and no back door that resolves another account's files. Access is decided from ownership and shares alone, and the role is not consulted: an admin reaching for another account's file gets the same refusal anybody else would.

That is deliberate, and it is the line the whole permission model is drawn on. An admin runs the server. Running the server is not the same as reading what people put on it.

What an admin can do is administrative and visible: change a quota, reset a password, change a role, or remove an account. A password reset does not reveal anything either; it issues a temporary password that must be changed on the next sign in, so it cannot be used quietly.

If you need someone's files, ask them to share the folder. That is what sharing is for, and it leaves a record.

When a drive goes away

Covered fully in External drives. In short: it is treated as a normal condition, the library is marked offline, one clear error is returned instead of unrelated failures, the app shows a banner, and every other library keeps working.