Will Harbor fill up my disk?

No. Keeping your disk free is a stated design goal, not an accident.

Harbor’s model is simple: the cloud holds everything; your devices carry what you need. Your notes sync down so browsing, editing, and offline work are always possible, and thumbnails keep attachments browsable — but the heavy files themselves come down when you open them, not all at once, on every device, forever.

The clever part is that search doesn’t suffer for it. The full-text and OCR index lives on the server, so a search can match a word inside a scanned PDF your laptop has never downloaded. You get the completeness of having everything with you, without actually storing everything everywhere.

In practice that means a decade of scans, photos, recordings, and PDFs can live in your Harbor account while the app on a small laptop stays a good citizen. Your phone doesn’t need a copy of every warranty document you’ve ever scanned — it just needs to be able to find them, and pull one down the moment you tap it.

If you’ve watched other sync tools quietly eat a drive, this is the opposite philosophy: Harbor is the archive’s home, your devices are its windows.