Spacedrive

Spacedrive is an open-source, local-first data engine written in Rust that indexes any data source and makes everything searchable from one place. Founded by Jamie Pine and originally launched as a cross-platform file explorer in 2022, it pivoted in March 2026 to v3 — a single-search-bar over your emails, notes, bookmarks, GitHub issues, and Slack messages. We rate it 70/100 — a fascinating, principled rebuild that is genuinely the only local data tool with a built-in prompt-injection guard, but still very early and carrying baggage from two unfinished versions.

What is Spacedrive?

Spacedrive was open-sourced four years ago by Jamie Pine, who raised a $2M seed round and built a 12-person team to ship a cross-platform file manager with peer-to-peer sync. v1's alpha was downloaded by half a million people and the repo became the 30th most-starred Rust project on GitHub, with 37,000 stars and 600,000 cumulative downloads. But v1 collapsed under infrastructure debt and v2 — a solo clean-room rewrite with 183k lines of Rust — never reached a stable release either.

v3, announced on March 10, 2026, is the team's third attempt and a deliberate downscoping. The thesis: the most valuable part of Spacedrive was never the file browser — it was the index. v3 ships as a local-first data engine. Each data source becomes a self-contained repository with its own SQLite database and vector index. Files stay where they are; Spacedrive just reads, screens, and indexes them.

Key Features of Spacedrive

• Eleven adapters at launch: Gmail, Apple Notes, Chrome Bookmarks, Chrome History, Safari History, Obsidian, OpenCode, Slack Export, macOS Contacts, macOS Calendar, and GitHub. Adapters are scripts in any language — read JSON config from stdin, write JSONL records to stdout.
• Built-in prompt-injection guard: Every record is screened by Meta's Prompt Guard 2 (open-weight) running locally on CPU in under 50ms per chunk. Adversarial text in incoming emails is quarantined before it reaches the search index — Spacedrive is the only local data tool with this as a first-class feature.
• Content classification pipeline: Each record gets a quality score from 0.0 to 1.0, plus noise detection and category tags. Email signature blocks, CI notifications, and Slack bot messages are pushed down in rankings or excluded from agent queries entirely.
• Trust tiers per repository: Notes you wrote are tagged "authored," shared Slack workspaces are "collaborative," and email inboxes are "external" with strict screening by default. Per-repository visibility controls let you mark repos private, shared, or agent-excluded.
• Local Rust core: Tokio, SQLite via sqlx, LanceDB for vectors, FastEmbed (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) for embeddings, BLAKE3 content hashes, AES-256-GCM encrypted secrets store. Single binary, no server dependencies, all data lives under ~/.spacedrive/.
• Tauri 2 desktop app + CLI: Both consume the same spacedrive-core Rust crate. The agent product, Spacebot, links the same crate directly — no IPC overhead.

What Users Say About Spacedrive

Sentiment is split. The community on Hacker News and r/rust has consistently praised Spacedrive's design polish, the ambition of the Rust-native architecture, and Jamie Pine's transparent communication. Earlier comments described the search as "lightning fast" and the UI as one of the cleanest in the file-manager space.

The recurring complaint is shipping. v1 promised P2P multi-device sync and never delivered. v2 built working sync but couldn't ship a stable release. Hacker News commenters on past releases flagged real bugs — directories with 15,000+ files reportedly became effectively non-navigable in v1's alpha. The v3 pivot has been received with cautious optimism, but several long-time watchers on the v3 testing GitHub discussion are openly skeptical that a third architectural reset will ship faster than the first two.

Spacedrive Pricing

Spacedrive is free and open source under AGPL-3.0. There are no paid tiers, no subscriptions, and no enterprise plans. The team has stated the core will be "free, open source, and local-first forever." The business model is the sister product, Spacebot — an AI agent for teams and communities that uses Spacedrive as its safe data layer.

Plan	Price	What's Included
Open Source	$0	Full desktop app, CLI, all 11 adapters, processing pipeline, search index — everything

Who Should Use Spacedrive?

Best for: Local-first enthusiasts, privacy-conscious knowledge workers, and developers building personal AI agents who want a screened, classified data layer instead of pumping raw email and Slack into LLM context. Anyone who has fought with Recall-style cloud indexers and wants the search without the surveillance.

Not ideal for: Users who need a polished traditional file manager today — v3 is not that product, and the file browser is now a single VDFS adapter rather than the headline feature. Teams needing multi-device sync should also wait, since cross-device repository sync is on the roadmap but not shipped.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The only local data tool with built-in prompt-injection screening — a real, OWASP-recognized risk that other RAG-style indexers ignore entirely.
• True local-first: no cloud, no telemetry by default, AGPL-3.0 license, single binary, all data under ~/.spacedrive/.
• Adapters are dirt simple to write — any executable that reads stdin and prints JSONL is a valid adapter.
• Trust-tier system and per-repository agent-exclusion are thoughtful answers to questions other tools don't even ask.

Cons:

• Two prior versions never reached a stable release — there is real shipping risk on v3.
• No multi-device sync at launch, despite this being the headline promise of v1.
• Adapter coverage skews macOS-heavy (Apple Notes, Safari History, macOS Contacts, macOS Calendar). Windows and Linux users have fewer integrations on day one.
• The pivot away from "file manager" will alienate some of the original 37k stargazers who wanted Finder, not a search index.

Alternatives to Spacedrive

For a traditional cross-platform file manager, look at commercial tools like Path Finder or open-source projects like Yazi. For local search across personal data, Recoll and DEVONthink (macOS) cover similar ground but without injection screening or trust tiers. For agent-ready local indexing, the closest peer is LlamaIndex with a local vector store — but that's a developer SDK, not a desktop product. Spacedrive's screening pipeline is genuinely unique in this space.

Verdict: Is Spacedrive Worth It?

Spacedrive v3 is the most architecturally interesting local data tool we've seen this year, and the only one taking AI safety seriously at the ingest layer. The downscoping from "cross-platform file manager for five OSes" to "local search index with a processing pipeline" is the right call. But two prior versions never shipped a stable build, and v3 is brand new — the public migration to the open repo only happened on March 20, 2026. We rate it 70/100: install it now if you're a Rust enthusiast or a local-first believer, but expect rough edges and wait six months before betting your knowledge workflow on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Spacedrive free?

Yes. Spacedrive is fully free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There are no paid tiers and the team has committed to keeping the core free forever.

What platforms does Spacedrive support?

Spacedrive v3 ships a Tauri 2 desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows, plus a CLI. v2's iOS app is no longer the focus; the v3 codebase replaces it.

Is Spacedrive open source?

Yes. The code lives at github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive. v3 became the default branch on March 20, 2026, with the v2 codebase preserved on a v2 branch.

How does Spacedrive compare to DEVONthink?

DEVONthink is a mature commercial macOS-only tool with deep document management. Spacedrive is open source, cross-platform, and adds a prompt-injection guard and trust tiers designed for AI-agent consumption — features DEVONthink does not have.

Does Spacedrive sync across devices?

Not at v3 launch. Single-device only. Cross-device repository sync and dedup are on the roadmap but were intentionally cut from v3 to ship a stable release.

What is the Virtual Distributed Filesystem (VDFS)?

The VDFS is Spacedrive's local filesystem adapter. Files stay in place; Spacedrive stores BLAKE3 content hashes, metadata, and extracted text so your local files are searchable alongside emails, notes, and other indexed sources.