local-first · peer-to-peer · open source
YadoriLink keeps folders in sync across your own devices. Files travel directly between devices over an encrypted tunnel; the service only ever learns who you are and which of your devices hold which folder — never what’s in your files.
● pre-1.0 — under active development · Rust · Linux / macOS / Windows
Contents move straight from one of your devices to another — no detour through someone else’s storage, and no relay in the middle. When both devices sit behind home routers, they punch through with a content-blind rendezvous signal; the service helps them find each other but never carries a byte of your files.
Give a folder every byte on a device, or keep it on-demand — placeholders that fetch the real file the moment you open it and can be evicted to reclaim space. Chosen per folder, per device.
The hosted service only knows who you are and which of your devices hold which folders. It never receives file contents, so a server breach, subpoena, or curious operator has nothing to read.
macOS, Windows, or Linux — it’s the same engine making the same decisions, so two machines never disagree about how a conflict resolves just because they run different operating systems.
Everything the app does can also be scripted — link a folder from a cron job, check status in CI, drive it headless on a NAS. The GUI is for everyday; the CLI is there when you want it.
Every line that touches your files, your keys, and the wire protocol is open source: read it, build it, and audit it yourself.
Devices talk over WireGuard-protocol encrypted tunnels. Paired devices on the same network find each other by local broadcast/mDNS and sync without touching the internet; across the internet, the same tunnel connects directly — discovering each device’s public address and hole-punching through NATs, with no relay in between.
The sync engine is exercised by deterministic simulation testing — seeded chaos runs with no-silent-data-loss oracles — because losing your edit is the one unforgivable sync bug.
Peer-to-peer sync isn’t new — Syncthing and Resilio already replicate folders with no cloud storage of contents, and Dropbox already does frictionless account and device management with cloud storage. YadoriLink aims at the combination:
| Dropbox | Syncthing | YadoriLink | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy account and device management | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| File contents never stored on a server | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| On-demand files that fetch on open | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Open-source sync, transport, and encryption stack | — | ✓ | ✓ |
YadoriLink is pre-1.0. What works, and what’s missing:
1. Download and install — prebuilt from GitHub Releases (nightly):
These builds are for testing and early feedback. Windows
builds are unsigned, so SmartScreen warnings are expected; macOS builds are
unsigned and not notarized. Checksums (SHA256SUMS) ship
alongside the artifacts.
2. Open the app and sign in — the setup wizard walks you from Google sign-in through device registration, creating a folder group or joining one from a new device, and picking your first folder. Install and sign in on a second machine the same way, and syncing begins.
Prefer a terminal? The same setup is five commands (the
installer puts yadorilink on your PATH):
$ yadorilink login
$ yadorilink device register --name "my-device"
$ yadorilink share create my-share
$ yadorilink link ~/some/folder my-share
$ yadorilink statusPrefer building from source? cargo build --workspace
--release — see the README.