Reading Drives From Snapshots

list-drive, list-folder, download-drive and download-folder read a drive's newest snapshot first, then the older JSON snapshots and GraphQL for anything after it. A snapshot that cannot be used, for any reason, falls back to the slower path, so a drive always lists the same way. Each listing logs one line to stderr saying whether a snapshot was used and why not:

[drive-state] bc9af866-6421-40f1-ac89-202bddb5c487: read 1543 entities through block 2025061 (xk_N9vGYgTuLUgyWlVbdHCkl_js_Bo35M2miM6porK4) - outcome=used

Set ARDRIVE_DISABLE_DRIVE_STATE=1 to skip snapshots for a run, and ARDRIVE_DISABLE_SNAPSHOTS=1 to skip the older JSON snapshots too.

The downloaded snapshot is cached under ~/.ardrive/caches/drive-state (ardrive-caches/drive-state in your home folder on Windows), so the next listing of the same drive does not download it again. For a private drive, the cache holds the encrypted snapshot, never the decrypted one.

To see whether a drive has a usable snapshot without listing it, use snapshot-info. It reads only and spends nothing:

ardrive snapshot-info --drive-id "bc9af866-6421-40f1-ac89-202bddb5c487"

The outcome is used when a snapshot was read, none-found when the drive has none, or the reason one was refused, such as unknown-version for a format this version does not read.