Your Telegram channel
Every uploaded file, as an ordinary document message. Open the channel in Telegram and there they are.
How it works
Two credentials, and then it just runs.
There is no storage layer to configure and no plan to choose, because the storage is a Telegram channel you already have. This page is the whole mechanism, start to finish.
Setting it up
Step 1
You make a bot
BotFather is Telegram's own bot for making bots. Two questions later it hands you a token that looks like 8123456789:AAF…. That token is the whole key to your bot, so it is treated like a password from here on.
Forty seconds. No developer account, no billing details, no approval queue.
Step 2
You make a channel
A private channel works best: only you can see it, and it keeps an unlimited backlog. Add your bot as an administrator so it is allowed to post. Channel IDs start with -100.
That channel is the disk. Everything lands there as a normal Telegram document you can also open in the app.
Step 3
You connect the two
Paste the token and the chat ID into Settings. Before anything is saved, both halves are checked against Telegram - getMe proves the token, getChat proves the bot can reach that channel.
If either half is wrong you get Telegram's own error back, not a generic failure.
Under the hood
What happens when you drop a file
On the way in
- 1
You drop a file
In the browser. Images are compressed here first, iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG, and anything over 4 MB is sliced into parts, before any of it leaves your machine.
- 2
The server checks it
Owner, folder, size. Anything over 100 MB is rejected now rather than after a slow upload.
- 3
Your bot posts it
sendDocument, into your channel, using your decrypted token - once for a small file, once per part for a large one. It never touches a bucket.
- 4
The row is written
Name, size, type, folder and the Telegram file ids - all from values the server verified. A file only appears in your drive once every part has landed.
On the way out
- 1
You click a file
The browser asks for /api/files/view/<id>.
- 2
The row is looked up
By Telegram file id and your user id together. Someone else's id reads as 404.
- 3
Telegram is asked
getFile resolves a path, then the file is fetched with your bot's token - part by part, in order, if it was stored in several.
- 4
It streams through
Straight to your browser as one file, and marked so that nothing along the way is allowed to keep a copy.
So where does everything actually sit?
Our database
Just the details: file names, sizes, types, your folder tree, your stars, and your scrambled bot password. Never the files themselves.
Your browser
Only what keeps you signed in, plus whether you like grid or list view.
Anywhere else
Nothing at all. We keep no second copy of your files anywhere.
The bot takes about a minute to make.
ownstorage handles the rest - folders, previews, search and locks.