Where your data lives

Short version: your data is in a folder, that folder is not inside the binary, and nothing that happens to the binary can touch it.

The install folder

Everything Local Drive owns lives under one directory. If you did not pick one, it is the platform's own location for this kind of thing:

Set LOCALDRIVE_HOME to put it somewhere else, or pass --dir to any command. To see the one actually in use:

localdrive status

Inside it:

Caddyfile              only used by Docker
docker-compose.yml     only used by Docker
.env                   configuration, and the paths below
data/
  db/
    localdrive.sqlite  accounts, folder names, share links, device list
    secrets.env        the keys that sign tokens and encrypt at rest
  library/             your actual files
  external/            drives you attached

Two directories matter. data/db/ is the database, and data/library/ is every file anyone has uploaded. Those two are your data. Everything else in the folder is regenerable.

The database and the files are separate things

This is the distinction worth being clear about, because they have very different sizes and very different homes.

The database holds no file contents. It records that a file exists, who owns it, and which library it is on. So the install folder stays small no matter how much you store, and the storage that actually needs room can live on a different disk entirely.

That matters on Windows in particular, where the default install folder is under %LOCALAPPDATA%. Nobody wants a photo library there. It is a fine place for a few megabytes of database, and the wrong place for 400 GB of video, which is why the two are not tied together.

Choosing where files go, from the app

Settings, Storage is the admin view of this, and no terminal is involved. It lists this server's own storage, every other library that has been registered, and any drives it has detected.

• A plugged in drive shows Use this drive, which mounts it and registers it as a library.
• Each library shows its own used, free and total space.
• Any library can be marked Default, which is where new uploads go.

So the ordinary answer to "where are my files" is: on whichever library is default, which is the install folder until you point it somewhere better. See External drives for the full flow, including combining drives and ejecting safely.

Drive detection and mounting need the mount helper, which is Linux under Docker. On Windows, mount the drive in Windows first and then point LIBRARY_PATH at it, as below.

The binary is not where your data is

The server executable holds no data. It reads its location from .env at startup and writes into data/, which sits beside it rather than inside it.

That makes all of the following true:

• Stopping the server loses nothing. SQLite commits each change before reporting it as done, so what has been written is on disk before the process ends. Stop it with localdrive stop, with Ctrl-C, or by pulling the power, and it comes back with the same contents.
• Deleting the binary loses nothing. You have deleted a program, not a library. Download it again, put it back, and it picks up the same data/ folder.
• Upgrading loses nothing. localdrive update replaces only the executable, and keeps the previous one beside it. See Updating.
• Moving to another machine is a copy. Move the folder, put a binary next to it, start it. Nothing is registered anywhere else on the system, so there is nothing to migrate.

The only way to lose your data is to delete data/ yourself, or to delete the folder holding it.

Docker changes nothing about this

Both ways of running use the same folder on the same disk.

Docker sees different path names for it, because a container has its own view of the filesystem: the host's data/db appears inside the container as /data/db. Compose sets those container paths itself, and .env holds the real host paths, so the same install works whichever way you start it and neither writes anywhere the other cannot read.

Nothing is stored in a Docker volume that only Docker can reach. docker compose down, or uninstalling Docker entirely, leaves data/ untouched, and the plain binary will open it.

Checking for yourself

localdrive status

prints the install folder and the database path. Then look:

ls data/library
du -sh data

On Windows:

Get-ChildItem data\library

Backing it up

Because it is one folder, a backup is a copy of one folder. localdrive backup does it consistently while the server is running, which a plain file copy of a live database does not guarantee.

localdrive backup

See Backups for scheduling and restoring.

Putting the library on another disk

The library is usually the large part, and it does not have to sit with the database. Point LIBRARY_PATH in .env at any path the server can write to:

LIBRARY_PATH=/mnt/storage/localdrive/library

Move the existing contents there before restarting, or the server will start with an empty library and files already in the database will not resolve.

Under Docker, add a mount for the new location in docker-compose.yml as well, since the container can only see paths that have been mapped into it.