Your own storage
MyArboris is, and remains, a hosted application: your family tree data — names, dates, relationships, sources, notes — always lives in MyArboris's own database, whether or not you connect your own storage.
What you can move is your media — photos and documents. By default those are stored by MyArboris (Cloudflare R2), included in your plan. Instead, you can connect your own S3-compatible storage — a bucket you control at a provider of your choice — and have new uploads go there instead.
Media stored in your own storage doesn't count against your MyArboris hosted-storage quota.
Availability and backups of your own storage are your responsibility. MyArboris doesn't copy files from your storage into its own as a backup — if your storage becomes unreachable, the affected files simply can't be shown until it's reachable again.
Supported storage providers
MyArboris connects to any storage that speaks the S3 API over HTTPS. These are tested, documented setups:
- Cloudflare R2 — setup guide
- Backblaze B2 — setup guide
- AWS S3 — setup guide
- MinIO / generic S3 — setup guide
Any other storage that offers a genuine, unmodified S3 API should also work — the MinIO/generic S3 guide is the right starting point for those.
Local NAS / home server
Today, MyArboris's own storage (BYOS) requires your S3-compatible storage to be reachable from MyArboris's hosted servers over the Internet, via HTTPS. A NAS or home server that's reachable only inside your own home network can't be connected yet.
We don't recommend exposing SMB or NFS file sharing directly to the Internet, and we don't recommend forwarding a raw storage port through your router without TLS and its own authentication — both turn your home network into a much larger target than intended.
PLANNED, not yet available: a MyArboris Local Connector that would run inside your own network and open an outbound connection to MyArboris — so your NAS would never need to accept connections from the Internet at all. This does not exist yet; there is no release date.
More about local/homelab storageSecurity
- Your storage credentials (access key and secret key) are encrypted before they're saved — never stored in plain text.
- Your secret access key is shown to you once, at the moment you enter it. MyArboris never displays it again after saving, even to you.
- When MyArboris shows or delivers a file from your storage, it uses a short-lived, temporary signed URL — not a permanent public link.
- MyArboris never makes your bucket publicly accessible. It's your responsibility not to separately configure your own bucket as public.
- Create a dedicated, least-privilege access key for MyArboris — scoped to one bucket, with only the permissions it needs — rather than reusing your cloud account's root or admin credentials. Each provider guide below shows how.
Setting it up
Once you have your endpoint, region, bucket name, access key, and secret key from your chosen provider, connect them from Account → Storage in the app.
Open Account → Storage