How to Preserve Your Memories Forever On The Permaweb with ArDrive
Storing family photos is more than just storing data- it’s storing memories. We have all stumbled across an old photo we had forgotten about of us with a friend or loved one, and seeing that photo vividly brings back the memory of that moment. But when it comes to storing your photos, what solution will you choose?
The most common option that people use these days is cloud storage – iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox and Box. The reason for that is most likely convenience. Smartphones offer the option to directly upload and manage your photos through them, and having this ability is a must for the modern amateur smartphone photographer.
But using these services comes with a major issue – centralization. Your photos may be sitting on multiple actual hard drives on the many servers of these companies, but there is still a single central point of access to them.
On top of this, users with a larger amount of photos to store are usually bound to a paid subscription to get access to more storage space. But now, with the ever accelerating innovation of blockchain technology, comes a new solution.
Store memories permanently on ArDrive
Arweave is a decentralised storage solution. Users can upload their files to Arweave’s permaweb and only have to pay a one time fee in order to store those files forever. The fee is paid in the native Arweave token called AR. But interacting with Arweave hasn’t been easy for the average user. Using a Command Line Interface (CLI) or writing your own JavaScript is something that a non tech-savvy user wouldn’t even know anything about, let alone be able to do themselves. User Experience needed a desperate upgrade.
This is where ArDrive came in. ArDrive set out to make uploading to the Arweave permaweb easy. ArDrive offers:
- Permanent and decentralised storage
- A user friendly Web App
- A seamless user experience
- A simple way to interact with the Arweave Permaweb
- Pay once – No subscriptions or monthly fees
- Multiple built-in tools (like a tool to upload files in bulk)
- Additional security on top of the already secure Arweave blockchain
- No loss of file integrity or photo quality over time
It was founded by Phil Mataras, a solutions architect with over a decade of experience working in Fortune 500 IT.
Phil had the vision of making life easy for everyone that wanted to take advantage of Arweave’s permanent storage. And that is what he and his team have achieved.
ArDrive offers a Web App where uploading your photos to Arweave is as easy as dragging and dropping them to the App. Users familiar with apps like Dropbox and Google Drive will find that doing so is very intuitive and user friendly. Once you have uploaded your photos, that’s it. They will be there, safe, forever.
And you only need to pay once to store your photos forever, no subscriptions or monthly fees are needed to access your photos in the future. Your photos will always be available in the same form that they were uploaded. There will not be any loss of quality over the years.
You can then easily access your photos directly though the ArDrive Web App, but on top of that you will also be able to access them through the Arweave link that will be generated for the file upon upload.
Your precious, irreplaceable photos are now immortal.
In order to get started with ArDrive all you need to do is follow these three simple steps:
- Get some AR tokens (here’s where you can buy them)
- Create a free wallet on ArConnect to store your AR tokens
- Use your wallet to log in to ArDrive
The cool part about all this is that you can actually get some free AR tokens directly from Arweave in order to test this all out. If you want to do so and get started using ArDrive just follow the steps on ArDrive’s Get Started Page. Here is a tutorial video, they have made to help you start:
What about uploading photos directly from your phone? We had a brief chat with Phil Mataras and he had to say this about the future of ArDrive:
“Our vision for ArDrive is to make permanent storage easily accessible and usable by anyone with public or private data they want to store forever. In 2022, this involves improving our support of any kind of project being built on ArDrive, extending our apps to new platforms like mobile, and improving overall file upload reliability and performance.”
Seeing as nowadays everyone’s smartphone doubles as a camera, having a way to upload your photos to Arweave’s permaweb straight from your smartphone will be a game-changer. Mainstream adoption of Arweave’s permaweb may come sooner than we think. One thing is for sure, the future of ArDrive is bright.
