Filesystem Guide

Pixeldrain has an experimental filesystem feature. It can be accessed from any account with a paid subscription (Patreon or Prepaid) by going to pixeldrain.com/d/me.

  • IMPORTANT: The filesystem is experimental. This means that it’s not finished yet. While the filesystem seems stable now and I am using it personally too, you are strongly advised to keep backups of anything you upload there.
  • If you experience any issues while using the filesystem, feel free to discuss them on the Discord community.

Contents:

Pricing

Every time you create or remove a file your account’s storage usage will be updated. This can take some time. If your account’s storage is full you will no longer be able to upload anything to the filesystem.

The Pro subscription has a storage limit of 2 TB. It doesn’t show on the profile page because it’s calculated differently from the other plans, but it is there.

For Prepaid plans the storage is charged at €4 per TB per month. You can view your usage in the transaction log.

All bandwidth used from the filesystem is charged, there are no free downloads from the filesystem. This means that any time you or anyone else downloads something from a directory owned by your account that bandwidth usage will be counted and charged at a rate of €2 per TB. It also means that you will not be able to access your files if your account reaches its bandwidth limit. Your only options then are to upgrade or wait for your transfer cap to free up again.

Directory sharing

Files in the the filesystem are private by default. Only you can access them from your own account. Files and directories can be shared by clicking the Share button in the toolbar while inside the directory, or by clicking the pencil icon next to the directory in the file viewer.

Shared directories and files will have a shared icon next to them in the file manager. Clicking that icon will open the shared link. You can also copy the shared link directly with the Copy link button in the toolbar.

If a shared file gets reported for breaking the content policy your ability to share files from your account may be taken away.

Limits

Here is a quick overview of the filesystem’s limits:

  • Max 10000 files per directory
  • Max file size is 100 GB
  • File/directory names can be up to 255 characters long
  • Path names can be up to 4095 characters long
  • You can have a maximum of 64 nested directories
  • The filesystem does not support hard or symbolic links, this might change later

When traversing a path, pixeldrain requests one directory at a time from the database. This means that filesystem operations will get slower the more nested directories you have. Keep that in mind when organizing your files.

Importing files

It’s possible to import files from your account’s file list to your filesystem. To do so, navigate to a directory in your filesystem, click the Import files button on the toolbar. It’s on the right side, between the Create directory and Edit files buttons. You will be prompted to select the files you would like to import. After selecting the files click Add and they will be added to your filesystem.

Client integrations

There are two ways to access your filesystem from outside the web interface.

Rclone

I have built a custom rclone backend to integrate with the filesystem. It can be found on my GitHub. To use it you will have to compile the project yourself. I will keep this fork in sync until the changes are merged into the real rclone. I have a pull request open with the master repo, but it has not been accepted yet.

FTPS

The filesystem also supports FTPS, both anonymously and with an account. The FTP server is hosted at pixeldrain.com on port 990. The encryption mode used is Implicit FTP over TLS. Here is an example configuration in FileZilla:

FTP configuration

There are two different ways to log in to the FTP server:

Read-write personal directory

To connect to your personal directory you need to enter your account’s username as username in the FTP client. The password needs to be an API key from the API keys page. If you connect now you will be able to access your personal directory (called /me). Here you can upload and download to your heart’s desire.

Read-only shared directory

To access a shared directory in read-only mode you need to enter the directory ID as username in your FTP client. The directory ID can be found at the end of a shared directory URL. Example: https://pixeldrain.com/d/abcd1234, in this case abcd1234 is the directory ID. The ID will always be 8 characters long and is case-sensitive. The password must be left empty