Imagine an unlimited cloud storage. Where you can store as much data as possible without having to pay a single cent? This is very useful to those who wants to share a piece of file that may exceed the upload limit of any cloud storage services out there.

You can take a look at a new technology called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system. Much like torrent but better since it also incentivize nodes who owns the data to ensure data persistence, the nodes will be incentivized by a cryptocurrency namely Filecoin. ipfs is developed in go programming language and the project is open source.

Let’s make a quick demo to show ipfs in action:

Adding a file to the ipfs is as simple as running a single command line ipfs add <file>

To download the file from ipfs, we need to know the cid of the file. The output of running ipfs add command returns the cid. We can use that to retrieve the whole file from the ipfs back to our local filesystem using ipfs cat <cid> > sample.png.

Using sxiv an image viewer tool can display our uploaded file on ipfs.

Link to the project repository https://github.com/ipfs

Here are the resources you can learn more about ipfs:

• https://ipfs.io/
• https://docs.ipfs.io/