My experience using Repertory in Windows Explorer as Sia front end
Being a long time follower of the Sia project (the only truly decentralized, data encrypted, censorship resistant storage network) and acting as a “host” (providing storage space) I stumbled on a Sia related project claiming to enable file system functionality on top of the Sia storage daemon; In theory letting you work with your files in the Sia cloud as were they sitting in just any other drive on your PC!
That project, “Repertory”, sounded so compelling, I got interested in testing what can, in the current Sia landscape, be accomplished by being a user renting space, shifting my position to being someone wanting to consume disk space by storing and retrieving files using the Sia ecosystem. This is a quick run over my experiences in the Windows set up. I did not use Linux or MacOS for this test, but it seems the project includes those flavors too.
Shifting to renting? To not mix up things, I decided to spin up a new Win 10 and do a clean install of a new Sia node + the Repertory software. If you’re new to Sia, there are many good articles describing how to set it up and where to get Siacoins, the tokens that serve as payment vehicle for the exchange of storage. One tip is to bootstrap the consensus DB, the growing blockchain file that holds all transactions which currently sits at a staggering 16GB. Letting the fresh Sia node go through its initial run can challenge one’s patience — it takes a good while(!)
Patience does pay off, and once complete, it was easy to fund the new wallet and set up a small allowance to start generating contracts with hosts. To my surprise, the establishing of contracts is now much faster than in earlier versions, and it was literally completed instantly. Fun fact: I aimed at a renting price point lower than my own hosting price: The beauty of a market driven system.
So.. back to Repertory, that in brief builds on WinFsp to mime Windows file system functio- nality and interacts with the Sia daemon to get data to/from the storage layer. Download and install is simple, and some dependent software (the WinFsp and a C-library are parts of it) is easily accessible as well. Set up is straightforward and only asks from you a drive letter (I chose “S” for Sia). If Repertory can’t find an active instance of Sia, it will just retry until successful. There are a few settings, but I left it as is.
Once started and with your Sia daemon running (I just started the normal Sia-UI) the following shows up in Windows Explorer’s properties for the new RepertorySia:
I gave it quite some serious testing, starting adding in the first little .txt file, adding many in one go, adding larger batches of different kinds of files and retrieving them again.
Despite that Sia-UI’s file manager is pretty good software, its focus is on up/downloading, hence rather simple and isolated from the work space where users normally operate. By using Repertory and the Windows Explorer, I was able to get a very good Sia user experience with exactly the same touch and feel as if Sia was just any other hard drive. (…in parenthesis off topic; I’ll leave it to you to decide, if Windows as an OS is any good user experience at all, but that’s a whole different story…)
Opening files for edit, and saving them directly onto the Sia cloud worked at a glance. Playing media files using VLC showed no issues as well — however I don’t have the insight, how playback/streaming is technically constructed.
Building a folder structure, copying it around, and working with files through it showed no errors as well. Moving, copying, renaming, deleting files inside/outside folder structures; all good. Creating in-app files (e.g. Word/Excel) and saving them as into Repertory and zipping them onto the same drive — all work exactly as your humble C: drive. The one or two little issues I found, the developer (Sia Discord member ScottG) was able to fix super fast!
Navigating, searching, sorting, grouping, and detailing out file information is all possible just as one would normally expect any other drive to behave via Explorer.
Already a renter not starting out with a blank Repertory? No worries, the interface retrieves any files/folder info currently held in the Sia cloud and depicts it in the explorer interface, for ease of access.
Stop Press!... Just when finalizing this article I had the great pleasure of looking into a new beta version’s functionality. Repertory can now act as a network drive set up on a PC where Sia is installed acting as a “host”. How cool was that to try out, accessing and uploading data on the Sia Network from a PC or many PCs, acting as “client(s)”, where Sia isn’t installed as was it just any other drive in your explorer list. Pretty amazing how it actually works and is not super complicated to set up. This way Sia+Repertory mime the functionality of a VERY large NAS — truly amazing!
Summing it up.
Let me mention some pros; Repertory introduces a well known interface to the Sia cloud, making it so much easier to navigate/operate files and access files, and I think it is a well thought of and well executed added feature for the whole ecosystem in terms of usability and ease of adoption. Despite its young age the project seems very mature from a functional and stability perspective. I’ve personally swapped to only use Repertory for anything renting on the Sia network because of it’s obvious ease of use and it’s presentation direct in the Explorer. It is also worth noting that Repertory runs locally on your HW, and has no interaction with any 3rd party services and has no call to know your seed. Feel free to skip the meat, but never reveal your seed :-)
Calling a few issues and opportunities; When browsing mid sized/large folders with media files(movies and pictures) the build up of the thumbnails is pretty slow, and one work around is to just use the list view. Perhaps this will be optimized either in Sia or in Repertory at a later point.
Final word on something completely different; Since I was until now following Sia from a hosting perspective, I’d nearly forgotten one important thing; the Sia network is elastic, eg. hosts come, hosts go, which is why you need your “renter” to be active, in order to let it monitor and immediately copy data onto a new host if any of “your” hosts holding data leave in order to still maintain x3 redundancy for guaranteed availability.
