A red timber loft in the snow with one lit window

Free and open source

Your files, kept at home.

Loft puts the shared folders on your NAS in the file app you already use, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Windows and Linux. A small gateway runs at home. No one else stores your files.

Download Set up a gateway

Your NAS, wherever you are

In the file app you already use.

Your shared folders show up in Finder on the Mac, in Files on iPhone, iPad and Android, in File Explorer on Windows and as a folder in your home directory on Linux. No new place to learn.

Files arrive when you open them.

Loft lists everything but only downloads what you open. When you save, the file goes back home. A big archive doesn't have to fit on a small phone.

The NAS stays in charge.

Loft signs in to the NAS as you, with the username and password you already have. The NAS's own permissions decide what you can see and change. The gateway can narrow that further if you want, but never widen it.

Not the cloud. The loft.

Loft doesn't copy your files to a server somewhere. They stay on your NAS, in your home, and they travel only between the NAS and your own devices, through a gateway you run yourself. There is no Loft account and no Loft server, and Incremental never sees your files, your file names or your password.

The Mac, Windows and Linux apps and the Android APK check for a new version at most once a day. That's the only request any Loft app makes to us, and you can switch it off. → Privacy

Three steps

  1. Install the gateway.

    Put the Loft gateway on a small Linux machine at home, next to the NAS. Run loft-gateway init. It asks where your shared folders are and sets everything up.

  2. Scan the pairing code.

    loft-gateway pair shows a QR code and a link. Scan it with the app, or open the link. The code carries the gateway's address and its keys, so your app talks to your gateway from the very first connection.

  3. Your files show up.

    Sign in with your NAS username and password. Your shared folders appear in Finder, Explorer or Files, and you use them like any other folder.

Your phone and computer connect over an encrypted connection to the Loft gateway at home, which reads and writes the files on your NAS.

How it works, in detailSet up a gateway

Five apps and one gateway

Android will be on Google Play, and as an APK from this site. → Which one to choose

What's encrypted, and who could see what

  • At home, the app talks to the gateway over an encrypted connection (TLS) that is pinned to your gateway's key, so it can't be redirected to someone else's.
  • Away from home, you choose how the gateway is reached:
    • Through a tunnel (for example Cloudflare Tunnel). It's easy to set up and needs no open port. The connection is encrypted, but the tunnel provider decrypts it on the way through, so the provider can read your traffic. Your password is never sent this way: you sign in at home, once.
    • Directly, with a port forwarded on your router. The connection is pinned to your gateway's key and encrypted end to end. Nobody in between can read it, and you can sign in from anywhere.
  • Your password only ever crosses a pinned connection to your own gateway. The gateway stores it encrypted, in a way that only works together with your signed-in device.
  • Between the gateway and the NAS, Loft uses SMB 3 with encryption switched on. For an older NAS without SMB encryption, the gateway can be told to allow an unencrypted connection on your home network. It's your choice, and it's off by default.

→ The full picture

Free, and the code is public

Loft costs nothing. The gateway and every app are open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so you can read the code, build it yourself and change it. → Source on github.com/Incremental-AS/loft

The name “Loft by Incremental” and the icon are not part of the licence. If you ship a fork, give it its own name.

Why “Loft”?

In Norwegian, a loft is the attic, the room under the roof. It is also an old farm building: a two-storey log house where the farm kept its food downstairs and its chests, best clothes and valuables upstairs, and where guests slept. Store norske leksikon calls it “both treasury and best parlour”. That's what we wanted for your files: a place at home for the things worth keeping.

→ More about the name

Both treasury and best parlour.
Store norske leksikon

Bring your files home.

Install the gateway, scan the code, and your NAS is in your pocket.

Download Set up a gateway