I first heard about this decentralized storage protocol, and honestly, I was drawn in by the airdrop news. At the time, I thought most projects like this were just hype—either painfully slow to use or more expensive than traditional cloud drives. After messing around, I figured it was easier to just stick with state-owned cloud storage. My attitude was to just grab some free benefits, upload a few test files casually, and never really thought it could replace my daily storage tools.

The turning point came from a forced choice. One night, my usual cloud drive suddenly started rate-limiting, and I couldn’t download dozens of GB of design drafts and project files stored there. The team was frantic, and customer service said it would take 72 hours to restore. That’s when I remembered to give this decentralized solution a try.

The migration process was surprisingly smooth. I was prepared to spend hours fiddling, but the upload interface was so streamlined—almost too much—no manual categorization or packaging needed. The system automatically handled file adaptation. Small files used Quilt, a batch storage solution, while large files were split using Red Stuff encoding. Later, I understood how Red Stuff works: it’s not just simple encryption but divides data into main slices and auxiliary slices, dispersing them across nodes worldwide. Even if two-thirds of the nodes go offline simultaneously, the data can still be fully recovered—this is based on XOR operations, a coding scheme much faster than traditional RS encoding in terms of encoding and decoding speed. I had an epiphany: decentralized storage can be both secure and smooth without lag.

After using Quilt, I realized how narrow my previous understanding of small file storage was. When designing, I accumulate lots of KB-sized images and assets. Before, they were scattered across various tools, taking up space and making management a hassle.