I’m Building a Secure File Workspace From Scratch — Here’s What I’ve Learned

I started building NovaCloud22 because I wanted to solve a problem I kept running into:

Files are easy to store. Controlling what happens to them after you share them is much harder.

Google Drive, Dropbox, and similar tools are excellent at storage and collaboration. But I wanted to experiment with building a workspace where storage, secure sharing, file collection, and other file workflows could live together.

So I started building NovaCloud22 from scratch.

https://novacloud22.dev

What is NovaCloud22?

NovaCloud22 is a secure file workspace.

The core idea is simple:

Store your files. Share them securely. Collect files from others. Stay in control.

A user can upload and organize files, then create protected sharing links with things like:

• Password protection
• Expiration dates
• Preview/download permissions
• Download limits
• Access tracking

There is also a file-request workflow where someone can upload files directly to a workspace without needing a NovaCloud22 account.

The interesting engineering problems

Building the UI was only a small part of the project.

The difficult part was figuring out what should happen to a file throughout its lifecycle.

For example:

text
User
  ↓
Upload
  ↓
Authentication
  ↓
File processing
  ↓
Encryption
  ↓
Storage
  ↓
Share link
  ↓
Recipient
  ↓
Access / download
  ↓
Analytics