Stealing Storage from Discord 

bro what

The internet's long-running insistance of using tax fraud as a punchline has got to be genuinely annoying for the IRS. Keep it up everyone, great bit.

If they introduced data per account or device, then remember this guy here

This is like me 25 years ago when I realised I could just attach my files to blank emails in yahoo and save them. I thought I was really clever and thought of something no one else had ever thought of too.

Just a word of caution, discord itself very specifically says in it's ToS that they can ban you or delete your server for whatever reason without any chance of getting stuff back. It has happened before and entire communities are lost. This is cool, but DO NOT put anything critical in.

Woah, this is blowing up a bit, thanks everyone for stopping by. A couple frequently mentioned comments I want to address: - *Will I release the code?* Definitely no. As I mention in the video this was a fun experiment/proof of concept, but to be clear: you shouldn't do this yourself, this is not a serious alternative to real cloud storage. - *You should back up your data, what if Discord removes it!!* I have it all backed up with real storage solutions, and I'm fully prepared for Discord to purge all my data. Especially with this video doing well, I'm expecting it to vanish at some point :)

Bro left discord flabbergasted 😂

That's a pretty interesting idea. You can also experiment with Telegram, just like Discord you have unlimited storage. But instead of small MB chunks, each user can upload up to 2GB per file and 4GB per file for premium users, and I'm pretty sure Telegram doesn't have a very strict ToS for these type of projects, unlike Discord.

Nice idea. Just one technical thing if you're already using node: use streaming. You don't need to "upload" your whole file to your NodeJS instance before processing. Stream your file to your server which encrypts the stream and immediately starts to upload. You can then dynamically chunk the stream while more data is incoming. Don't work on the whole file on your NodeJS part :D

what i'm really impressed with is he managed to create a node.js server that deals with files and had no memory problems

A nice video to shake our own minds to look for the reson behind every facility why its free. How they are earning. Nice brainstorming and cool video. Loved it

this is great, the usage of nodejs this way kinda inspiring keep it up bro

This is a very fun experiment! Great idea to try to implement for testing (and only for that, as I personally wouldn't rely on the stability of this). This just shows you how much can be done with a basic node application, so easy to implement all sorts of crazy ideas!

I used to use a private Discord server with only myself for storing many files like photos and videos, but I quit after just half a year. Discord began permanently preventing the loading of half the files that I uploaded there, essentially deleting them. At least I only uploaded like one gigabyte in total, but this was still very problematic.

ive been doing this with my art for a while now! really convenient and makes it easier to download and share to friends

this is such a cool idea for a project, well done! and great presentation running and monitoring a cdn sounds like a nightmare. there must be so many ways to exploit and annoy it, even with what the average user just considers "normal" usage (eg huge uncompressed images and videos). i do not envy the people who maintain cdns, but im very grateful they exist haha

This is pretty cool. You could steal even more storage by saving the metadata (message IDs of the chunks, filename, etc) in discord messages also, instead of storing it on your server. For instance, you could use a data structure such as a btree or a hamt and store its nodes as messages, and the root node could e.g. be the only message in a specific channel. This way you could get away with minimal memory usage on your end

you should include file hashes for every upload inside of the bot's message to maintain file integrity and warn the end user if something doesnt check out. and with these new discord cdn changes, all you have to do is store the message id and you can get the new attachment link from it every time you need it plus the message contents(ie the file hash).

This reminds me of suckerpinch's "harder drives" video - you have a very similar energy! Loved the video, +1 sub

I really like the idea of splitting the bits up within files, it’s cool you actually managed to apply this using a discord bot. Well done!

This is awesome! I was thinking you were just going to upload rar files with like 25MB each file, like how usenet newsgroups were.

Wow, this takes me back. Great video btw and a crazy idea. Back in the late 1990s a few friends of mine used to do something similar with our college email account. My memory is that we used WinRAR and just broke up files to whatever the attachment limit was back then. We used this to share files back and forth because it was easier and faster than making that many floppy disks, and zip disks were expensive. The sysadmin for the system did eventually tell us to stop using his email for this purpose. Then he told us about IRC...

I had been wanting to do something like this for years. Awesome you did it!

I had this idea a few months back, but didn't have the coding know-how. Really cool project!

In order to prevent overloading the server, handle the encryption and file splitting on the front end as an additional layer of security. I am aware that the server runs locally in your situation as well, but in a production setting, it most likely runs on Google Cloud or Azure. The server should only be able to upload the files to Discord because neither of these two businesses can be completely trusted with privacy also It is necessary to store the database locally to avoid sensitive informations from leaving your environment.

You can post each file bundle in a thread with the filename as the name of the thread. this will help you to search through the files if you need to and also help in case your database breaks

I mean, I use discord to keep artists names (not musical one, or any of the sfw ones...), I use it to store shit for school, I store funny meme images, but what you doing here sir is straight up genius!

This is the solution to my storage problems, thanks for the wonderful idea!

The level of quality information and subtle humour is amazing. Subbed.

This is what is known as the "Tragedy of the Commons". A free resource will always be depleted by the greedy, and eventually they're gonna have to put limits on it and make you pay for Nitro to do the same thing you used to do.

This video kept popping up right after I uploaded my infinite storage video haha. So weird we have such similar videos and editing styles and randomly blew up at the same time. Good luck with the RU-vid grind brother

I’ve been using discord as a file transfer system (phone to pc and vice versa) for a while now this is a logical step forward

This is really cool! I expected you to have hundreds of thousands of subs with this kind of quality

I watched the first seconds of the video and though that the creator must have at least 50k subs. This is some high quality content!

Telegram users in the corner 😏😏

I did my university thesis on basically the same thing :) It is really amazing to see this.

omg, ive literallt thought about this once, and thought no one would have the courage to do this. ure definitely a legend for this one and literally read my mind

Instead of uploading the entire file to the server before splitting it into chunks, you should stream it to discord directly. This could effectively cut the upload/download times in half since it's doing both phases in parallel, as well as allowing larger files than the server's memory allocation. To gain even more performance you could read a certain number of chunks ahead and upload them to discord in parallel, which will improve performance if uploading to discord is far slower than uploading to your server.

been doing this since 2018, really helpful to store screenshots.

DESERVED SUBCRIBE!!! Amazing work, you made me rethink my cloud storage provider :P

I remember seeing a meme project someone did a few years ago called something like "Discord as a cloud service" where they did basically exactly the same thing. It's a pretty funny, idea.

Quick note for someone rushing to recreate the project: Discord will slightly change the way we can access files on a server, now (or very shortly) you will receive a temporary download link when clicking on the download button. AFAIK the new arguments are already there on the link but are useless and removable for now.

It's cool to see how this stuff works breaking files into smaller parts, and when downloading, it downloads from every part. Impressive! However, I'm not the kind of guy who uses cloud services. i use an Pi NAS because its unbeatable.

My dude we were already doing this, this video just exposes our secrets to the wrong people.

man i really hope Discord doesn't start cracking down this this now that this video is somewhat popular. I've been using discord as a personal file dump for awhile now, its so convenient. I would be so bummed if they started putting more restrictions in place.

telegram would suit your case a lot better, it allows 2gb file uploads for free, the only downside is slow upload speed

This is a sick video. This has been an idea I've made, but I didn't decide to make a feature to split the files in 25mb chunks. I had encryption tho. [ The project I made is discontinued because this was 2 years ago lol ] Nice video!

One of the best videos i seen this year. Great work your content is as great as your projects.

I've been stroring my documents to discord ever since the pandemic, its nice to see that i am not the only one who does this

Hey i had the same idea too but like a year ago, even used encryption and all that. Also can confirm that even after a year the data is still downloadable.

damn, i've been thinking about this stuff and finally someone just made it

I love the little message you left in the secret file. Chicken nuggets are awesome.

very interesting idea! i have been doing this for a while now to store small files (up to 25mb though most of them are less than 8 as that was the old limit). from my experience, the links to files only expire if the message/channel/server get deleted (obviously) so i dont think there is much to worry. also when i opened this video it was on 5k views, after finishing it, it now stands at around 7k views. crazy stuff!

as someone who’s legitimately working on a custom personal document storage solution using S3 as a replacement for Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. I loved seeing this experiment!

this is mind-blowing stuff. well done

this guy is the reason discord is making discord files temporary :)

Cool! I've made similar kinda things before, so maybe some suggestions: - You mentioned that you get all the download urls, and store them in a local database. This creates a dependency on your database. At the end of the upload, you could just create a .txt file with all the meta data, and also upload that to discord. Like you could have a chunks channel, and a meta-data channel for completed uploads, for example. - You can make your uploads look less suspicious my combining a zip with a png - (for example, in plain windows cmd "copy /b image.png + archive.zip output.png") - though I'm not 100% sure whether Discord tries to apply image compression if it thinks it's a png - You could also upload a extra PAR2 file like on Usenet, in case one of the files goes missing somehow

This is pretty cool, I was thinking about doing the same thing a while ago back when Discord allowed only 5MB per file, since cloud storage in my country is pretty high, i just create multiple Gmails xD

This was a great video! I've been in the MLP Fandom since i was like, 7 in 2011, and I know of most of rhese stories!

I would rather buy storage then all this, but thankfully you made a really good piece of software solving a major storage issue.

I would love to make a better up-to-date version of this with you, maybe with storing in multiple places at once? I actually do have a similar but faster (and more integral) version of this. Keep up the good work.

as someone has probably already said, you can zip the file to make it smaller (zip already comes with encryption iirc) and instead of sending the file to the server then discord just give the client info to upload/download itself (this may or may not work with browser restrictions but a simple command line app may solve this) cool stuff :)

ive been doing that for ages with my art and school stuff, very useful indeed

Ive been doing this for a couple years now. Its been the neatest work out ive came across lol

The godly power you get by learning a programming language and a bit of creativity is insane

This guy's going to be real confused when all his data starts mysteriously disappearing in about a years time

You can attach multiple files to one message. This can reduce the amount of API calls and therefore reduce the uploading time, as well as deletion time.

this is a fun little project that will definitely not have challenges and will definitely not look like a waste of energy especially because i can't put on my resume.

The change in links will not affect the creation as you could simply do it using your discord bot - you can just save the channel/guild/message ID and make the bot fetch the message

As someone with half a petabyte in their home NAS and most of it backed up to the cloud as well this is great but discords policies around data privacy scare me too much for that

Ive been doing this for about a year now. Helps me further categorize my data

Someone actually has an app that does literally same thing with Telegram. It shares files with a Telegram chat and then downloads them from said chat if needed. It's really neat and completely free. And as long as you set it up right, also safe.

That's kinda neat. I do something similar with 7zip where I compress it into part files and upload it, but not on the same scale. Usually just for Among Us mod packs. Kinda wonder if you could get a Discord bot to behave like a fileshare. That would be wild. Keep years worth of snapshots of all of your proxmox machines in discord

Do note that discord has recently started adding features preparing for making every file uploaded to discord temporary, specifically because people do this and scams often use discord as a filehost, so be careful with this and watch out for any announcements about temporary files.

Bro has never used Telegram

Legit accidentally already did this yesterday. My laptop ran out of storage and I had a long recorded video from some gameplay I wanted to save. I thought to myself that I might as well upload it to youtube so that I can store it there. Worked like a charm

Edit: 7:17 clarifies this, lookin' forward to how this is got around! Regarding 5:16, Discord is introducing a new feature where a file has an expiry time and special token when you click on a file. So even if they knew those 3 things, they'd also need the token and expiry parameters. It then just wouldn't work. NTTS covered this as a means to prevent from people using Discord's CDN as a malware host.

This is against the TOS. I don't have Discord, but I spend 15 minutes reading them.

I love using my server to store videos and random files I have, very useful.

Great stuff, thanks for posting this

Fun and smart idea, however, for issues upon privacy and maybe size partitions, I would love to see a follow up video on how you do this for telegram , with a size limit of only 2GB per file.

Great video! Here is another idea I thought of. Why not just upload everything to the Internet Archive? As far as I know there isn't any limits- " no limit to number of files. However, from a systems perspective, we do not recommend files larger than 50 GBs to be uploaded or more than 1000 files, per single page" only con I can think of is the data would be public not private.

Discord and google are thankful for even more of your data.

to bypass the "links expiring" with the new discord update you could make a bot send a message in a private server with the download attachment, then when u want to download the file again your bot reads the attachment url from the message, which will grab an updated url which will work.

In Telegram messenger you have unlimited storage forever btw

It's understandable that the author does not want to release the code for this "solution" but then again this does not look like it is too hard to replicate. Regarding storage, I still find myself liking HDDs a lot for archiving. They are super cheap in terms of cost per GigaByte.

I've noticed that files posted years ago don't exist anymore. Other projects like this one exist, but don't rely on them. just self-host nextcloud or something

ive been doing this for years. i have a private gc with all my alt accounts and i store literally everything in it - be it a random video i need the link of, a date i need to remember, all my account emails/passwords or school files. its so useful, but definitely risky if someone hacks you.

How about storing files in telegram?

imagine running game servers on discord 💀💀

Coding all this, uploading it, encoding it and then actually finding the file and doing everything in reverse to get it out. This is a great method to use if you value your time below $2 a month

ive been doing this for so long! and im really impressed how discord can storage so much

Discord already intent to make download links expire after some time.

Idea: make a new gmail 😊

But this will only work as long as the bot exists (and Discord)? But what if the support for the bot ends?

I used to save memes by sending them in a private discord server but I noticed that if they are there too long then some of the oldest ones, seemingly at random will start to be "not found"

I would personally use splitting with WinRAR or something similar you can encrypt the entire thing and you aren't sending plain text + you get a bit of compression depending on type of the file

Interesting video. This is fairly simple to do but a clever idea. The arbitrary RU-vid storage has been done to death but in hindsight Discord would be really obvious to do this on. If you wanted to get real speed you could make this a CLI tool as opposed to web interface, to skip out on all the issues with using a browser. Also - react is a bit overkill for this, no? 😂

I've done this for years. I made a personal server for myself with labels and I always compressed the zip files to smaller sizes.

thats so cool! i got a question tho, how does a line of code that sends as text the "content" of the file looks like?