<title>Pithos — a control panel for your Sia storage</title>
<metaname="description"content="Pithos runs s3d, the Sia S3 gateway, for you: connect it to Sia, create S3 users and keys, browse and share buckets, and watch uploads land on the network. In Theseus, on the desktop, or in a browser.">
<h1>Your own S3, <spanclass="g">stored on Sia</span></h1>
<pclass="tag">Pithos runs <ahref="https://github.com/SiaFoundation/s3d">s3d</a>, the Sia Foundation's S3 gateway, without the command line. Connect it to Sia, hand out access keys, manage buckets and watch your files reach the network.</p>
<nav><span>Get started</span><spanclass="on">Overview</span><span>Buckets</span><span>Users & keys</span><span>Sia connection</span><span>Settings</span><span>Logs</span></nav>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">🔗</div><h3>Guided setup</h3><p>A step-by-step guide takes you from a free Sia Storage account to a working S3 key. Pithos opens the approval page for you and carries on by itself the moment you approve.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">🔒</div><h3>Locked with your PIN</h3><p>In Theseus, Pithos opens with your vault PIN. Three wrong tries and Theseus asks for your master password instead. Lock the vault and Pithos locks with it.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">🔑</div><h3>Users & access keys</h3><p>Create a user per app or person. Issue and revoke keys, copy ready-made config for the aws CLI, rclone or environment variables, and save keys to an encrypted file protected by a password or your Theseus vault.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">🔁</div><h3>Switch Sia accounts</h3><p>See which Sia account your storage runs on and give it a name. Switch to another account any time: the old one's users, keys and buckets are set aside on your computer, never deleted, and restore with one click.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">🗂️</div><h3>Buckets & files</h3><p>Browse any user's buckets, drag files in, download them, delete folders, and make a bucket public-read when you want to serve files.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">📤</div><h3>Share links</h3><p>Signed links that work without a key and expire after an hour, a day or a week.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">📈</div><h3>Upload pipeline</h3><p>See what is still buffered locally, what is already on Sia, and anything that failed. Flush the buffer on demand.</p></div>
<divclass="card"><divclass="ic">⚙️</div><h3>Daemon & settings</h3><p>Install the official s3d release with its checksum verified, start and stop it, follow its logs and edit its settings, including redundancy and upload threads.</p></div>
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<h2>How it works</h2>
<pclass="lead">Your apps talk plain S3. s3d encrypts and erasure-codes the data and spreads it across independent Sia hosts. Pithos sits beside s3d and runs it for you.</p>
<divclass="flow">
<divclass="node"><b>Your apps</b><small>aws, rclone, backups, any S3 SDK</small></div>
<divclass="arr">→</div>
<divclass="node s3d"><b>s3d</b><small>S3 API on your machine · encrypts locally</small></div>
<divclass="arr">→</div>
<divclass="node sia"><b>Sia network</b><small>independent hosts, 3× redundancy by default</small></div>
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<divclass="ctl"><b>Pithos</b> starts and watches s3d, holds the Sia connection, issues keys and shows you the pipeline.</div>
<pclass="lead"style="margin-top:1.4rem">Files are encrypted before they leave your computer. Sia hosts store pieces they cannot read, and no single host holds enough to rebuild a file.</p>
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<h2>Three ways to run it</h2>
<pclass="lead">The same Pithos everywhere: one engine, one interface, three homes.</p>
<p>Built into the Theseus browser. It lives in the left sidebar beside your quick links, opens with your vault PIN, and widens to full window when you need room.</p>
<spanclass="status ok">Built into Theseus 0.3.74</span><aclass="status ok"style="text-decoration:none"href="https://dl.silentmode.st/latest/TheseusNavigator-Setup.exe">Download Theseus</a>
<li><b>Create a free Sia Storage account</b><span>Sign up at <ahref="https://sia.storage">sia.storage</a>: 50 GB free. You sign up with Sia Storage directly; Pithos never sees that password. Or use your own indexer.</span></li>
<li><b>Choose your recovery phrase</b><span>In Theseus, let Pithos take it from your password vault: nothing to write down, and your vault backup restores your storage. Or create one and write it down.</span></li>
<li><b>Approve Pithos</b><span>The approval page opens by itself. Approve the app on Sia Storage and Pithos starts your gateway and creates your first access key.</span></li>
<li><b>Your recovery phrase stays local.</b> It goes straight to the s3d process on your machine and is never stored, logged or uploaded. Taken from your Theseus vault, it is built inside Pithos and never shown on screen.</li>
<li><b>PIN-locked in Theseus.</b> Theseus asks for the PIN in its own prompt, so Pithos never sees it or your master password. Three wrong PINs require the master password.</li>
<li><b>Loopback only by default.</b> The control panel listens on 127.0.0.1 and rejects requests that arrive under any other host name.</li>
<li><b>One-time sign-in.</b> Theseus and the desktop app open the panel with a single-use secret that becomes a strict, HttpOnly session cookie.</li>
<li><b>No cross-site tricks.</b> Every change needs a custom header that other websites cannot send.</li>
<li><b>Verified downloads.</b> s3d binaries are checked against the Sia Foundation's published SHA-256 before they are installed.</li>
<li><b>Untrusted files stay inert.</b> Downloads are served sandboxed, so a stored HTML file cannot run inside the panel.</li>
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<h2>Questions</h2>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>Is Pithos a storage provider?</summary><p>No. Pithos is a control panel. Your data goes from s3d on your machine straight to Sia hosts, paid through your indexer account. Silent Mode never sees or holds your files.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>What does it cost?</summary><p>Pithos is free and open source. Storage is billed by your Sia indexer, for example sia.storage.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>Which s3d version do I need?</summary><p>v0.2.0 or newer. Pithos offers to install the right one for you and tells you when yours is too old.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>I already run s3d as a service. Can Pithos manage it?</summary><p>Yes. Pithos uses the same config file a hand-run s3d uses. If s3d is already running, Pithos shows it as external, reads its stats and leaves the process alone.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>What is the difference between a Sia account, an S3 user and a bucket?</summary><p>The <b>Sia account</b> (for example on sia.storage) pays for the space; your s3d is connected to one. <b>S3 users</b> are logins on your own s3d, each with its own access keys, so you can give an app its own key and revoke it alone. A <b>bucket</b> is a top-level storage container, like a drive, owned by one user; folders inside it are just part of each file's name.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>Can I switch to a different Sia account?</summary><p>Yes, under Sia connection › Switch Sia account. s3d connects to the new account and starts empty. The previous account keeps its files, and its users, keys and buckets are set aside on your computer so you can restore them later. Pithos warns you first if uploads are still on their way to Sia.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>What if I forget my PIN?</summary><p>After three wrong tries Theseus asks for your master password, which always works. You can set a new PIN any time in Theseus Settings › Passwords.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>Is there a size limit?</summary><p>Uploads from the Pithos window are capped at 5 GiB per file for now. S3 clients such as aws and rclone use multipart uploads and go well beyond that.</p></details>
<detailsclass="faq"><summary>Why the name?</summary><p>A pithos was the great storage jar of the ancient Greek world, where a household kept what it could not afford to lose.</p></details>
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<h4>pithos.sia</h4>
<pstyle="margin:.4rem 0 0;max-width:320px">A control panel for s3d, the Sia S3 gateway. Part of Silent Mode.</p>
<divclass="wrap"style="margin-top:1.6rem">s3d is MIT-licensed software by the Sia Foundation. Pithos is an independent, MPL-2.0 Silent Mode project and is not made by the Sia Foundation.</div>
