Every file in your filespace is assembled from unique chunks — small, immutable pieces stored exactly once, across every user. You pay for unique data. Copies are free, because on Stone, copies don't exist.
Picture a wall of ten thousand identical bricks. You could store ten thousand bricks — or one brick and a note that says ×10,000. Deduplication is that note, applied to everything you own.
Stone splits every file into chunks along natural seams in the data, and gives each chunk a unique cryptographic fingerprint — a name so precise that two chunks share it only if they are byte-for-byte the same.
A file, then, is just a recipe: an ordered list of fingerprints. Before anything uploads, the client shows the bedrock its recipe and asks one question per chunk — seen this one? If yes, done. A reference is enough. Only chunks the bedrock has never seen actually travel.
This is why your bill tracks unique data, and why a teammate joining your project makes storage cheaper, not pricier. Their copy of the footage is your copy of the footage. The bedrock noticed long ago.
Boundaries are chosen by the content itself — not by a ruler. More on why that matters below.
Each piece gets a cryptographic fingerprint. Same bytes, same fingerprint — anywhere, from anyone.
Identical chunks are stored exactly once across the whole service. Every duplicate after the first is a footnote.
Cutting files into pieces is easy. Cutting them so the pieces survive an edit — that's the craft.
The obvious approach slices a file every so-many bytes, like cutting a rope at every metre mark. It works beautifully — until you edit. Insert a single frame at the head of a clip and every byte after it shifts. Every metre mark now lands on different data. Every slice changes. Your one-frame edit re-uploads the entire file.
Stone chooses boundaries by the data's own texture — the way a river settles around whatever stones it meets. Cut points cling to the content, so when you insert that frame, the boundaries downstream fall exactly where they always did. The edit disturbs only the chunks it touches — the pebbles the river actually moved. The rest of the file doesn't even notice.
A recipe isn't a queue. It's a fan. Open a file and its chunks are fetched in parallel, from wherever is closest — hundreds at a time, no single pipe to saturate, no line to stand in.
A 100 GB master starts playing while the rest of it streams in around you. You only ever wait for the chunks you're actually touching.
New chunks travel in parallel too. Saturate a gigabit line or a 10-gig office pipe — the fanout keeps up. It scales with your connection, not our patience.
Bytes stream directly between your machine and storage. The brain hands out the map — it never carries the cargo, so it never becomes the bottleneck.
A worked example. Five editors on one film, each syncing the same 2 TB of footage.
10 TB
Five accounts, five copies, five bills. The same bytes, stored — and charged — five times over.
~2 TB
The bedrock sees one copy. Editors two through five sync in minutes, because almost nothing needs to travel.
~40 GB
A re-export of a 2 TB project uploads only what actually changed. Gigabytes, not terabytes. Minutes, not a weekend.
Pricing follows the same rule — you pay for what's unique. See plans →
An honest note: deduplication happens entirely inside Stone's encrypted domain. Chunks are protected in flight and at rest, and matching never reaches outside the service — privacy is not traded for savings. How Stone protects your data →
Stone is in invite-only preview. Start a free 200 GB filespace and watch the dedup counter do its thing.