Frequently asked questions

Three things: a Raspberry Pi (Pi 4 or Pi 5 recommended, Pi 3 works too), a USB drive with your files on it, and a microSD card (16 GB or larger) for the software. Most people are up and running in about 10 minutes.

The download page has the full parts list, and the installation guide walks you through every step with screenshots.

Yes. Free at home, forever. Streaming your films, music and photos on your home network, network file shares, and everything in the app costs nothing and needs no account.

The optional remote access subscription adds access from anywhere in the world through your own address (yourname.myusb.cloud), plus extras like automatic drive mirroring and photo album sharing. It also supports the ongoing development of myUSBdrive.

No. There is no port forwarding, no router settings, and nothing to configure. At home you open http://myusb.local in your browser. With remote access, your secure connection runs through a Cloudflare tunnel that sets itself up, so your home network is never exposed to the internet.

No. Your devices find myUSBdrive by name (myusb.local), not by number, so it keeps working whatever address your router hands out. Remote access doesn't use your home IP address at all.

If you like to reserve an IP for the Pi in your router, that's fine, but it's never required.

Nothing. myUSBdrive never depends on your public IP address. The Pi makes an outgoing connection to Cloudflare, and your personal address (yourname.myusb.cloud) follows that connection. If your provider changes your IP, the tunnel simply reconnects on its own.

There's no dynamic DNS to set up, no port forwarding, and nothing to update when your IP changes.

myUSBdrive works at http://myusb.local in browsers on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and iPad. Android is the exception: it doesn't support .local addresses, which is a limitation of Android itself rather than myUSBdrive.

The best answer is remote access. Your own address (yourname.myusb.cloud) works on every device, including Android, at home and away, with automatic HTTPS encryption.

If you only need local access without a subscription, a free network discovery app such as BonjourBrowser from the Play Store can find myUSBdrive on your home network. It works, but only at home, and needs the extra app.

Yes, with the remote access subscription. Your films, TV series, music and photos stream directly from the drive at home to wherever you are, on any device with a browser. No copying files around, no uploads, and nothing stored in anyone else's cloud.

The built-in player handles films, TV series, music and photos in any modern browser. Movie posters, episode details and album artwork appear automatically when your files are named simply.

The user guide shows the exact naming that works best for each type of media, with examples.

No. Your files are never opened, scanned, or uploaded. To find a poster, myUSBdrive sends only a short search query built from the name: the movie title and year taken from the filename (say, "Interstellar 2014") goes to The Movie Database, and the artist and album folder names go to TheAudioDB. The matching artwork is then downloaded to your drive.

That's the whole exchange. No file contents, no library listing, and no account identity travel with it. Videos you mark as home movies are never looked up at all, and a cover.jpg in a music folder means no online lookup happens for that album.

Your files live on your USB drive, plugged into your Raspberry Pi, in your home. They are never uploaded to us or anyone else. Nothing is scanned, sold, or used to train AI.

With remote access, your files travel encrypted from your Pi to your device. We can't see them, and neither can anyone else. The privacy policy spells out the small amount of account data we do hold.

Yes. With remote access, any photo album can be shared with a private link that opens in any browser, with no app or account needed at the other end. Links can expire after a week, after a single view, or never, and you can revoke them at any time.

See sharing a photo album in the user guide.

Yes. The drive mirroring feature (part of the subscription) automatically copies your main drive to a second USB drive plugged into the same Pi, so a drive failure doesn't cost you your files. There's also a recycle bin, so deleted files can be recovered.

Your files are safe. They live on the USB drive, not on the Pi, so a dead Pi (or a worn-out SD card) doesn't touch them.

To rebuild: write a fresh copy of myUSBdrive to an SD card (free from the download page), put it in a new Pi, or the old one if only the SD card failed, and plug your drive back in. You're back in about 10 minutes, and because posters and album artwork are stored on the drive itself, your library comes back looking exactly as it did. If you have a subscription, sign back in to reconnect your remote access.

Your files are always yours, and everything that's free at home keeps working exactly as before. Only the subscription features stop: remote access, your custom domain, drive mirroring, the recycle bin and album sharing. There's a grace period after expiry, so a missed renewal doesn't cut you off instantly.

New subscriptions come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Details are in the terms.