I'm Paul. I'm 68, I've been programming since Visual Basic in the late 1990s, and myUSBdrive is probably the most enjoyable thing I've ever built.
It started years ago with a simple problem. I had files on a USB drive — films, music, photos, documents — and I wanted every device in the house to be able to reach them. My phone, my laptop, my iPad. So I set up a small Raspberry Pi, plugged in the drive, and wrote some Python to share it across the local network.
We called it MUD. My USB Drive.
MUD worked well as a basic NAS, and I gave copies to a few friends and family. But for watching films, I was still using Kodi — which was fine at home, but no use anywhere else. I wanted to be able to stream my movie collection, my music, my TV series, directly from my own device. Not just on the sofa, but on my iPhone, from wherever I happened to be.
That's what pushed MUD from a simple file server into something bigger. I built media playback directly into the software — a proper player for films, music and photos that works in any browser. Then I added remote access through a secure Cloudflare tunnel, so you can reach your files from anywhere without making your home network less secure or dealing with any complicated setup.
I spend a lot of my spare time hiking. I've walked the Pennine Way and the West Highland Way, trekked across the north of Ireland, and I'm often somewhere in the hills of Derbyshire, north Wales or south Wales.
I record a lot of it for my YouTube channel, @hilltreks. I could use Netflix on those trips, but I wanted to watch my films — on my phone, from a campsite, ideally within easy reach of a hot shower and a pub.
That's the real reason remote access exists. Not because it sounded like a good feature, but because I actually wanted it.
Over time, MUD quietly evolved into myUSBdrive — a fully featured NAS and media server that runs on a Raspberry Pi. I ended up with three devices at home myself, keeping copies of family files and archiving my hiking videos. My friend Tim somehow has five. Like me, he was using one just as a manual backup — plugging in a second drive and copying files across by hand. That's exactly why I built the automatic drive mirroring feature, so others wouldn't have to.
myUSBdrive is completely free for home use because I believe everyone should have an easy way to keep their data in their own hands, without having to upload it to services like iCloud, OneDrive or Google where free storage is limited and your files are governed by someone else's rules. If you find it useful and want to support the project, you can buy me a coffee. The remote access subscription helps me continue developing myUSBdrive and other projects I have in mind.
I built this because I wanted it, I use it every day, and I've put a lot of care into making it genuinely easy to use. No technical knowledge needed. Just plug in a USB drive and go.
The idea behind it has never really changed: your files, your hardware, your control.