How does the InstantDrive document vault store company documents?

Last updated: 5 November 2026

What is the document vault?

The vault is the central store inside an InstantDrive account. Every document a company uploads, forwards by email or saves from a mapped drive ends up there, with a standard file name and a set of fields read from the document: a category, an entity name, an identifier such as a tax registration number or licence number, and any issue or expiry date found.

It is built for the paperwork a UAE business has to keep and find again: trade licences, Emirates IDs, tenancy contracts, supplier invoices, bank statements and employment documents. It is not a general file-sharing tool and it is not a version-control system. The sections below describe what it does, in the order a file meets it, and what it does not do.

What are the four vault folders?

Every company gets four top-level folders when the account is created. In the app they appear as Employees Vault, Vendors Vault, Company Expenses and Admin Vault, next to an All Sovereign Files view that shows everything at once. When a file is uploaded, InstantDrive picks the folder from what it read in the document.

The folder is a first guess made by software. If a document lands in the wrong place, check it and correct the category or entity in the document panel. The folder rules are fixed in the product. You cannot define your own rules for which folder a document type uses.

How do documents get into the vault?

There are several ways in. All of them run the same pipeline: size check, compression, reading, naming, then storage. The routes differ only in where the file starts.

The phone app is an installable web app, not a store app. A desktop sync client does not exist. WebDAV is a mapped network drive that reads and writes through the server, not a background sync of a local folder.

Which file types and sizes does the vault accept?

The limit is 100 MB per file. A larger file is refused with a size error, both by the web server and by the application, so the limit holds on every upload route including WebDAV. There is no way to raise it on a plan.

PDFs and images are read and filed. Accepted image types are jpg, jpeg, jfif, png, webp, heic, bmp, tiff and avif. Email files (.eml, .msg) and plain text files (.txt, .csv, .json, .xml, .html, .md, .log) are read for their text. Archives, CAD drawings, audio and video are stored without being read, and their names fall back to a generic pattern. A password-protected or damaged PDF is stored as a general document with a name taken from the original file, because there is nothing to read.

What does the vault do to a file on upload?

Before a file is stored, InstantDrive reduces its size where it can do so safely. The original is never stored next to the reduced copy, so the stored file is the processed one.

One consequence is worth knowing. The file name keeps the extension of the file you uploaded, so a phone photo uploaded as .jpg can be stored as WebP data under a name that still ends in .jpg. The stored content type is WebP. If you need the exact original image bytes, keep the original on the phone.

How does duplicate detection work?

InstantDrive computes a SHA-256 hash of every uploaded file and compares it with the hashes of the live documents in the same company account. When the same bytes are uploaded again, no second copy is stored. The upload returns the existing document and flags it as a duplicate.

The comparison is exact. Two scans of the same paper are different files and will both be stored, and a PDF that was saved again from another program usually has a different hash. Documents you deleted are not counted, so uploading a deleted file again creates a new record. Two different files that end up with the same generated name in the same folder are both kept, and the second gets a number such as _1 before the extension.

How does search work in the vault?

Search looks for the text you type inside four fields of each document: the file name, the entity name, the identifier and the category. It matches part of a value, and it ignores upper and lower case. Typing the last digits of a tax registration number, a supplier name or part of a licence number finds the document, because the reading step already stored those values as fields.

Search does not look inside the body text of a document. A word that appears only in the middle of a contract will not be found unless it is also in one of the four fields. Results come back 50 at a time by default, up to 200 per request, newest first, and you can also filter by category. This is why the file name matters: the naming page explains how the name is built so that it is easy to search and sort.

How do downloads work, and what is the 15-minute link?

In the web app, a download does not pass through the InstantDrive server. The server creates a presigned link to the file in Cloudflare R2 object storage, and your browser downloads from storage directly. The link is valid for 900 seconds, which is 15 minutes. After that it stops working and the app creates a new one the next time you open the document. A copied link therefore cannot be used for long.

WebDAV is the exception. Windows does not reliably follow redirects to presigned links, so the mapped drive streams file bytes through the InstantDrive server for GET and HEAD requests. The same sign-in rules apply, but this route does not use the 15-minute link.

What happens when you delete a document?

Delete is a soft delete. The document disappears from the vault, from search and from the mapped drive. There is no trash view and no restore button, so a deleted document cannot be brought back from the app. The stored file is not removed from storage either. The delete is recorded in the audit log with the user and the time.

Treat delete as final for day-to-day work. If someone deletes a document by mistake, the only route back is to upload the file again. If you need a record of what existed, the audit log is the place to look, but it records the action and not the file.

What does a first week look like for a fictional company?

Al Noor Trading LLC is a fictional Dubai company with eight staff. On Monday the office manager uploads the trade licence, the Ejari contract and the company bank statement from the web app. They go to the Admin Vault and Company Expenses. A scanned copy of the licence is converted to WebP, which reduces its size, and the licence number and expiry date are saved as fields.

On Tuesday each employee photographs their Emirates ID with the phone. These go to the Employees Vault, with a personal sub-folder for any employee already entered in the company directory and a Pending sub-folder for the rest. On Wednesday the finance clerk forwards five supplier invoices to the bills address. On Thursday someone uploads the Ejari contract a second time by mistake. InstantDrive recognises the identical bytes and returns the existing record. On Friday the manager searches for the last digits of a supplier tax registration number and gets the invoices in one list.

What does the vault not do?

It does not keep versions of a document. It has no trash or restore. It does not search the full text of documents. It does not enforce retention periods or legal holds. It does not sync a local folder in the background and it does not import from Google Drive, OneDrive or SharePoint. InstantDrive can discuss a migration with you by contact.

The folders and the category choice are made by software and can be wrong, so check what lands in the Employees Vault in particular. The vault also does not name a storage location for your files in the product, so do not assume one.

How do you start using the vault?

Start with the documents you are asked for most often: the trade licence, the lease or Ejari contract, the Emirates IDs of staff and the last quarter of supplier invoices. Check the file name, category and dates InstantDrive extracted for each one, and correct any field that is wrong. Then use search to find three of them by an identifier. If you plan to use the mapped drive, test one upload and one download first. The pricing page lists the plans, and the free trial lasts 30 days.