MasterVault
File storage that keeps your clients' information in South Africa.
A private, encrypted workspace for your documents — running on infrastructure in Cape Town, managed by us, with the contracts and audit trails your obligations require.
Why this exists
Convenience quietly became a liability.
Almost every small firm in South Africa keeps client documents in a consumer cloud drive. It was the fastest thing available, it works, and nobody thought much about it.
Then POPIA came into force. Now the accountant holding tax records, the attorney holding case files and the clinic holding patient details are all responsible parties with real duties — and the tools they are using were never built to help them meet those duties. There is no operator agreement. There is often no clear answer about where the data physically sits. And when someone asks for a record of who accessed their information, there is nothing to hand over.
MasterVault is the same everyday convenience, on infrastructure you can point to, with the paperwork already done.
What you get
Somewhere definite
Your files are stored in Amazon S3 in the Africa (Cape Town) region, and the servers that run your instance are in South Africa too. When a client asks where their information lives, you have a specific answer.
Everyday file work
Desktop sync for Windows and macOS, mobile apps, and a browser client. Shared folders, share links with expiry dates and passwords, version history, and recovery of deleted files.
A real audit trail
Every view, download, share and deletion is logged against a user and a timestamp. When someone exercises their right of access, you can produce the record rather than reconstruct it.
Retention you control
Set how long categories of documents are kept and have them removed on schedule. POPIA says you may not keep personal information longer than necessary — this is how you make that true rather than aspirational.
Access that matches your org chart
Group and folder-level permissions, so the intern doesn't have the same reach as the partner. Quarterly access review reports on the Professional plan.
Your data, portable
MasterVault is built on Nextcloud, which is open source and uses open formats. Export everything whenever you want. We would rather keep you because the service is good than because leaving is painful.
Honest about what this is
MasterVault is managed Nextcloud. We think that's a feature.
We are not pretending to have written a file sync engine from scratch. Nextcloud is mature, open source, audited by a large community, and used by governments and universities. Building on it means you get a proven product rather than our first attempt at one.
What we add is the part that is actually hard for a small firm: running it properly. Hosting in South Africa, patching it, backing it up, monitoring it, restoring it when something breaks, and standing behind it contractually. You could self-host Nextcloud — some of our customers could genuinely manage it. Most would rather spend that time on their own business.