Local-first
DumpSock's defining property: the bytes go from your phone to your disk and nowhere else. No cloud round-trip. No telemetry. No account.
What "local-first" means in practice
- The iPhone is plugged into your Mac via USB.
- DumpSock talks to it over Apple's standard AFC service (the same one Finder uses for "Files on This iPhone").
- Each photo / video is read off the device in a single bulk stream.
- DumpSock writes it directly to the destination folder you chose.
- No intermediate cloud, no third-party server, no API endpoint.
There is no "DumpSock cloud" because there is no DumpSock cloud. There never will be.
Why we built it this way
- Privacy by architecture. Things that don't exist can't be subpoenaed, leaked, or breached.
- Speed. USB 3 maxes out at ~5 Gbps — orders of magnitude faster than uploading 70 GB of video over a home internet connection.
- Cost. Cloud storage you pay for, even if your data never moves. Your SSD you buy once.
- Trust. Cloud accounts get suspended. Subscriptions lapse. Companies pivot. Disks you own keep working as long as the disk does.
- Reproducibility. With cloud, you have one copy at the mercy of someone else's uptime. Locally, you can pull twice into two destinations and have two physical copies.
What this means for you
- DumpSock works without internet.
- DumpSock works behind any firewall.
- DumpSock can run on an air-gapped machine if you want.
- You can rebuild your photo library from the destination folder without ever opening DumpSock again — the on-disk layout is a vanilla folder tree of standard
.heic/.mov/.jpgfiles.