Documentation for Tahoe-LAFS Users

Note: these links are to the 'trunk' (latest) versions of the documentation. See the 'docs' directory of a Tahoe-LAFS release for docs relating to that version.

The Basics

• ​about: the Tahoe-LAFS filesystem and the unique properties that it offers
• ​quickstart: how to get the software and set it up
• ​running: how to run it once it is set up

• Known Issues​: things you need to be aware of if you want to rely on Tahoe-LAFS to store your valuable data.
• How To Report A Bug: We love bug reports! Here's how.

• ​The story of a file, interactive illustration by Drew Perttula.

• Frequently Asked Questions: with answers!

• UseCases: the ways in which Tahoe-LAFS should be useful
• AdvancedInstall: more information about building and installing Tahoe-LAFS
• SFTP Frontend: compatibility issues for accessing Tahoe-LAFS via SFTP
• Tips & Tricks

A Glance Under The Hood or "Gee What Does This Button Do?"

• ​configuration: a description of the contents of your ".tahoe" directory
• ​architecture: a succinct overview of the whole system
• ​Command Line Interface: the basic "how to" for the CLI
• ​Web API: the basic "how to" for the WAPI
• Capabilities what are capabilities; the different kinds that we currently use

Presentations / Papers

• ​http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/attachment/wiki/News/tahoe-RSA-slides.pdf presented at RSA 2010
• ​Tahoe – The Least-Authority Filesystem presented at ​Storage Security and Survivability '08
• ​Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem presented at ​PyCon2008, providing an overview of the Tahoe-LAFS design, and the ​slides (.zip) that were used for the presentation
• ​A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries For Storage to be presented at ​FAST-2009: 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies

See Also

• The News page for sources of news and information.
• The Bibliography page contains links to scientific papers of interest.
• The RelatedProjects page extensions to Tahoe-LAFS, integrations of Tahoe-LAFS into your favorite other tools, and links to a few other decentralized storage projects that you might be interested in.
• The Dev page for Tahoe-LAFS hackers.

The Parade of Release Notes

release notes	date	what's new
v1.8.1	November 28, 2010	minor bugfixes, including a security fix and a performance improvement to downloads; also binary packages of dependencies for more platforms
v1.8.0	September 24, 2010	performance and fault-tolerance of downloads, internationalization on Windows, logging, packaging
v1.7.1	July 19, 2010	upload bugfixes, Debian init scripts, etc.
v1.7.0	June 18, 2010	SFTP, unicode, servers-of-happiness
v1.6.1	February 27, 2010	fixes a few small regressions in v1.6.0
v1.6	February 1, 2010	performance improvements, usability improvements, deep-immutable directories
v1.5	August 1, 2009	WUI style, forward-compatibility, no size-limit on directories, more efficient directories, safer mv
v1.4.1	April 13, 2009	garbage collection, improved diagnostics, performance improvement when downloading many GB files
v1.3	February 13, 2009	repairer, backup command, large files, (S)FTP server, more
v1.2	July 21, 2008	fix a minor security flaw, add operational improvements
v1.1	June 11, 2008	fix rare but serious issues, improve UI
v1.0	March 25, 2008	It's version 1.0!
v0.9	March 13, 2008	Tahoe is now ready to be relied on for secure storage
v0.8	February 15, 2008	"visibility" into the system and more user interfaces
v0.7	January 8, 2008	decentralized directories and mutable files, a FUSE interface, and new open source licensing options
v0.6.1	October 15, 2007	packaging, usability, and performance improvements
v0.6	September 24, 2007	improved performance and packaging
v0.5.1	August 23, 2007	fix a security problem in the Web API
v0.5	August 17, 2007	the Web API and the command-line interface
v0.4	June 29, 2007	new mutable, shareable, private directories
v0.3	June 6, 2007	improved basic functionality
v0.2	May 2, 2007	the first public release, on May 2, 2007 and giving a general overview of why the Tahoe project exists