VaultBox: self-hosted file platform

The problem

Cloud drives are rented shelf space. The subscription grows with your archive, the provider scans your content, and one account flag away from lockout is not a comfortable place for two decades of files. Consumer NAS software solves storage but delivers a UI stuck in 2012, and most self-hosted alternatives choke the moment a folder holds six figures of files.

What we built

A personal file platform with the interactions people actually expect from a modern drive: drag-and-drop uploads, thumbnails and previews, folder trees, sharing links, search, and bulk operations, running entirely on owned hardware.

The unglamorous engineering is where it holds up:

• Large-folder performance. Server-side pagination and sorting with a jump-to-offset control, so a 100k-file folder scrolls like a 100-file one. Sorting happens in SQL, not in the browser.
• Storage abstraction via rclone. The storage layer speaks rclone, so the same UI can back onto local disk today and any of forty cloud remotes tomorrow, including encrypted overlays.
• Service-to-service API. Sibling applications use the platform as their file backend over an internal network, with scoped tokens, so one storage brain serves many apps.

Architecture

FastAPI backend, React SPA, PostgreSQL for metadata, rclone for the storage plane. Deployed as containers behind Traefik with automatic TLS and a Telegram-code 2FA gate in front of the UI. Nightly metadata backups; content lives on mirrored disks.

Outcome

The cloud drive subscription is gone, the archive is at home, and the platform quietly became infrastructure: other portfolio apps now store their files through its API instead of reinventing uploads. It is the boring, load-bearing kind of successful.