What Drive does
Drive is a personal cloud file storage app, built as a faithful clone of Google Drive's core experience. Sign in with your Google account, and you land in your own private space — upload a file and it appears instantly in your list; click download and it's back on your device. Nothing about it feels like a demo: the interface matches Drive's real visual language, from the blue accent color and Roboto typography down to the familiar "+ New" upload button and file-list layout.
The core of the app is real per-account privacy. Every file belongs to exactly one Google account, and that ownership is enforced at the database level — not just hidden in the UI. Sign in with a different account and you get an empty drive, not a filtered view of someone else's files. There's no shared folder anyone can stumble into.
Storage is metered the way a real cloud drive is: each account gets 100MB, shown as a live usage bar in the sidebar that fills up as files come in and turns red near the limit. If an upload would push you over, the app tells you exactly how much space is left and how large the file is — before the upload even starts, not as a failed attempt afterward.
The file list itself updates in real time. Upload something and it appears immediately, no refresh needed, because the list is backed by a live database subscription rather than a one-time fetch. A search bar filters that list by filename as you type, and every file shows its size and the date it was added, matching what you'd expect from a real file manager.
Tech stack
Frontend: React 18, Vite, Tailwind CSS, MUI icons Auth + metadata: Firebase (Authentication, Firestore) — enforced with per-user Firestore security rules, not just client-side filtering File storage: Cloudinary (unsigned client-side uploads) Hosting: Vercel, via GitHub Actions CI/CD (lint + build on every PR, deploy on merge to main)
