Distributed / Enterprise
Most of CargoShip is a single command you run on one machine. Distributed mode is for a different problem: archiving research data that lives on NAS boxes and file servers around a lab, without pulling it all back to one host first.
Today that means one thing — ghost ships: autonomous agents deployed to a remote NAS (QNAP, Synology) that continuously monitor local paths, apply archival rules, and upload straight to S3, with no data round-trip. Each runs independently. See ghost-ship.
Central coordination was removed in v0.20.0
Earlier versions also shipped a central controller, a cargoship-launch agent binary, and a cargoship webui dashboard for managing a fleet from one place. That subsystem was never finished — most of its request handlers were empty — and a security audit found an authentication bypass in it, so it was removed rather than hardened. See issue #340.
If you used cargoship controller, cargoship webui, or cargoship-launch, they no longer exist. Ghost ships are unaffected: they were built to archive autonomously and never required a controller to function.
When you need it
Reach for a ghost ship when data sits on a NAS that you want archiving itself, continuously, on rules you set once. For a one-off or scripted upload from a single host, plain cargoship upload is all you need.
See also
- ghost-ship — configuration and archival rules.
- QNAP / NAS deployment — step-by-step deployment.
- Deployment guide — production CargoShip on a server.
- Execution contexts.