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DOCUMENT STORAGE FOR YOU AND YOUR AGENTS

Your documents. Your agents. One system.

Docbank gives you and your agents one authoritative place to file, find, organize, version, and verify the documents you depend on. You keep the authority: the vault and its history live on your own machine rather than inside a provider account. Stable identities let people and agents reorganize documents without losing track of them, every stored byte can be checked, and incremental backups can be verified before you rely on them. Work directly from the CLI, automate through the authenticated HTTP API, or embed Docbank in a Go application.

Install the latest release on Linux or macOS:

curl -fsSL https://docbank.ai/install.sh | sh

Windows and source-build instructions

Start your vault Ten-minute tour Build agent workflows

What Docbank gives you

Indexed local retrieval

Search document names with ranked results and browse a virtual tree without putting a cloud service between you and your archive.

Identity beyond the path

Move and rename documents while stable IDs and retained version history continue to identify them.

Integrity you can check

Every content version has a SHA-256 identity, and docbank verify re-hashes every stored byte on demand.

Recovery you can rehearse

Incremental backups reuse unchanged content, verify independently, and restore into a separate vault for inspection.

The ordinary workflow stays direct:

docbank add ~/Documents/taxes --dest /taxes    # import a folder; sources untouched
docbank tree /taxes                            # browse the virtual tree
docbank search "insurance"                     # ranked name and verified plain-text search
docbank put revised.pdf /taxes/2026/return.pdf # add a new immutable version
docbank versions list /taxes/2026/return.pdf   # inspect retained history
docbank rm /inbox/junk.pdf                     # move to recoverable trash
docbank verify                                 # re-prove stored content
docbank backup create --repo ~/Backups/docbank # incremental snapshot

Own the authority, not just the disk

Self-sovereignty here is practical: the vault, catalog, history, and recovery path are under your control. Everything lives on your machine in an inspectable layout. Import copies files and never touches the sources, so moving a Dropbox or Google Drive export into Docbank is safe to attempt and repeat until it is complete.

Why move beyond Dropbox or Google Drive?

Cloud drives are good at synchronization and sharing. They also make a provider account part of the authority for your archive: access, retained history, and recovery depend on the service and its policies. Docbank is built for the copy whose integrity and continued availability you control yourself. It does not sync files to every device or create share links; those are deliberate boundaries, not hidden omissions.

Why not just put everything on a NAS?

A NAS is useful storage, and some NAS products add checksums, snapshots, search, or replication. Those capabilities depend on the particular appliance and filesystem, and folders still make a path do too many jobs at once. Docbank adds a document-level contract: stable identity across moves, retained versions, recoverable deletion, content verification, permanent audited scopes, and one authenticated interface for people and software.

A NAS can be a good home for a Docbank backup repository when you protect it with filesystem permissions and encrypted storage. The distinction is simple: storage answers where the bytes live; Docbank records which document they belong to, what happened to it, and whether the vault and its backups still prove out.

One authority for people and agents

The standalone CLI, agents, and scripts use the same authenticated loopback API; none has a privileged shortcut into the vault. Stable IDs survive renames, downloads carry digest evidence, and revisions expose conflicting edits. Version pruning, trash emptying, and garbage collection begin with dry-run previews. Generate the live contract with docbank openapi --json, read Docbank for Agents, or follow the Agent Integration Guide through a complete verified filing workflow.

A Go application can instead own independently rooted vaults in-process through the embedded API, with the same storage model and exclusive ownership rules.

Guarantees you can inspect

Immutable content

Every retained version keeps a verified SHA-256 identity, and bytes are durable before the catalog references them.

Deliberate lifecycle

Trash, permanent deletion, and space reclamation are separate, explicit decisions rather than side effects.

Verified backup & restore

Incremental snapshots restore into a separate vault and are verified before they are trusted.

Audited history

Opt a directory into permanent, tamper-evident history that Docbank can independently re-verify. See Permanent Audited History.

Two ways to run it

  • Standalone. A local document system: the CLI and a daemon on your machine, with one authority per vault. Start with the Quickstart.
  • Embedded. A Go module: independently rooted vaults in-process, with the same storage model and lifecycle guarantees, on CGO or pure-Go SQLite. See Embed in Go.

Status

Docbank is alpha software. The latest release includes archives and checksum-enforcing installers for Linux, macOS, and Windows on amd64 and arm64. Implemented and tested today: the core store and ingest pipeline, the virtual-tree CLI, the authenticated daemon API, stable content versions with verified replacement, reversion, pruning, and lookup by content hash (refs), tags, permanent audited history with independent verification, loose and packed storage with explicit maintenance, whole-vault integrity verification, incremental backup create/verify/restore, and the embedded Go API. Docbank is not yet a stable 1.0; the Roadmap gives the product direction.

Docbank belongs to a family of personal data tools alongside msgvault, the communications archive. Where msgvault preserves an immutable record of your messages, Docbank manages working documents: files you still organize, retrieve, and build workflows around.

Where to go next

License

Copyright 2026 Kenn Software LLC.

Docbank is open-source software licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.