How Quark Works
Quark is a small device on your home network. It stores your files on drives you own. By default, your content stays on hardware you control.
Your files, your network
Phones, laptops, and tablets on your home WiFi talk to your router. The router talks to Quark. Quark talks to your drive. Your files are on that drive — not on a Google server, not on an Apple server, not in a data center you will never visit.
How this is different from iCloud or Google Photos
With typical cloud storage, your photos and files travel over the internet to a computer you don't own. They come back when you ask for them. Convenient. Also rented.
With Quark, day-to-day use is local. Files move over your own WiFi to a box in your house. You own the hardware. You own the data.
Remote access, once it ships, is planned as a private path to that same box — not a copy of your files on our hardware. If we ever offer an optional backup or sync service, it would require your explicit opt-in. It would not be the default, and it would not be forced.
Accessing from outside your home
Remote access is coming soon. Today, Quark works on your home network: your phone or computer reaches it over your own WiFi. In the current release, Settings → Network shows remote access as Coming soon, so there is nothing to turn on yet.
Why not yet: the Quark side is built, but the app cannot bring your phone or laptop onto that private network yet.
What it is meant to be when it ships: a private path to your box, not a hosted cloud. Your files stay on your drive, and we do not store a copy of them. It stays off until an admin turns it on, each Quark gets its own network rather than being pooled with other households, and turning it off again is one switch.
What Quark stores
When you plug in a drive, Quark keeps things in ordinary folders:
- Photos and videos — from your phone or computer, browsable by date
- Documents — PDFs, notes, spreadsheets, whatever you keep
- Media — books, videos, and files from any device on your network
Everything is real files in real folders. No proprietary lock-in.
The files live on the drive, not in the box
This is the part worth understanding, because it is the reason the rest of the pitch holds up.
Quark is the thing that serves your files. The drive is the thing that holds them. Your photos and documents are written to the storage device as normal files in normal folders, and they stay there whether or not Quark is running.
So if the box dies, gets replaced, or you simply unplug the drive and carry it to a laptop, your files are still there and still readable. Nothing is trapped in a database or a format only we can open. Swap the box, keep the files.
Backups (coming soon)
Persisting on the drive is not the same as being backed up, and this is the honest tradeoff of keeping your files at home: nobody else can read them, and nobody else is quietly keeping a spare copy for you either. Google does that second part on your behalf, and charges you for it in a currency you may not want to keep paying.
It is a solved problem, though, and you solve it once. Copy the irreplaceable folders onto a second drive and keep that drive somewhere a bad day cannot reach — a fireproof box, a relative's house. Do that and the tradeoff costs you an afternoon rather than your photos.
Quark does not do the copying for you yet. Automatic copies to a second drive is a feature we are building, and we would rather ship it late than ship something that quietly stops working and takes your only backup with it. When it lands, the shape we are aiming for is:
- A second drive attached to Quark that holds a full copy of what matters
- Copies that run on their own, on a schedule, without you remembering to start them
- Somewhere obvious in the app that tells you the last copy actually finished
Until then, the copying is manual and the plan is the ordinary one: a second drive, and a third copy somewhere that is not your house. See the Security Guide for the 3-2-1 version of that.