With so many ways to save icons, images and files on webservers (one idea I had was to use the SD card on a camera) - I settled on using my BlueIris server.
Since it's a local web server, yet is running on windows (in my case) - I setup a shared folder under the blueiris web directory and have been sticking icon sets, images for backgrounds and text files there. Since I don't like to have extra web servers to manage this works well for me to get around my inability to have file access/sharing/storage on the HE. BI has a fairly robust web server and it does a great job - and since it's already in my backups configuration, I don't have that to worry about either!
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nice. i wonder if this can work for a regular NAS share or a shared folder on a non web server...time to test!
You can put files on HE in its local folder tho' right? Restricted to 1Gb I recall but it works good for me. What does the BI approach you mention offer beyond the HE files approach?
Unsure of the file size limitation - never affects me. The BI approach. and I'm certain i'll be corrected but:
as I understand it there is not way to store files on a hubitat like through an smb or share. So a windows user just can't copy paste. It's well described as 'new' with all kinds of wierd efforts to work around.
being able to create a shared folder, drag and drop files and reference them as urls reallly is nice! I just played a 4GB video so not sure what your 1GB limitation means.
You can manually upload a static file onto the HE hub from the settings area (File Manager). If you want to automatically upload files I'm not sure that you do that. There are limitations at the moment as well on drivers or apps being able to store files, but you store some information via RM rules.
From what I have seen described elsewhere, the HE team want to see how people want to use this feature before embarking on too many avenues to store files. So I would expect the options to grow over time.
Yeah, the HE is not a web server. I use a Pi running Apache2 for that. But certainly you can put files on HE in the local file store and then address them locally within your LAN using the ip address of the hub, including in RM rules (eg. for playing sound files). The 1GB is the total space allocated to this file store if I recall correctly.
I have used the local file storage to store a HTML file I am using to cycle through images based on a JSON file, also stored locally on the hub, using Variables to output the JSON text. So you can use it as a basic file server to serve up web content, just without the dynamic stuff.
To elaborate a bit - I am aware HE can store files! I'm also aware of File Manager within HE but for me, I've always hated web-based file managers like OneDrive and Google drive etc. My needs for file management were Windows based file management, without adding more stuff, like a standalone webserver as brought up previously.
Surely, everyone has there own native environments they are comfortable with - This posting was a tickler for something potentially overlooked that in some cases was already embedded in a persons HA environment.
The needs my BlueIris thought solves:
Because HE is a web server, it needs another web server to reference files stored - so Check.
File size/storage space limitations - limited only by the available space - Check.
( A previous question was about file limits, which in my HE is 1GB of storage space according to my HE screen - In the BI environment, it's only limited by the available space.)
I also benefit from using my native Windows File Explorer to drag and drop files, groups of files, sub-folders etc. Check.
For me and my anal-retention, it's my answer to handling file storage as it related to my HE environment. I love being able to keep things grouped - something I can't find how to do within HE. And in all honesty, I'm not comfortable using HE for file storage as I'm not sure where it's going in that department at this time and I'm not excited to be involved in alpha/beta testing of things if I don't have too!
(Update : it occurs to me that from a feedback POV, it would be nice to be able to 'point' HE file storage to an external location - like back into my BI folders 
Then I could easily handle the HE files, (files like Dashboard backups etc) which I currently have to hand manage 1 file at a time.)
Beta testing for Hubitat is opt-in only. I don’t think there’s much of note in the current platform beta regarding file storage.
I would guess that any alpha testing is done completely in-house, since they do their own beta testing before opening beta testing to users.
I suspect your taking that reference in it's most literal sense - from my memory I recall that 'file storage functionality' was not moving forward until Hubitat got some feedback or something - I'm not fully up to date on features being fleshed out like file storage and/or any thing in the pipe or down the road... except maybe an awareness 2.2.9 may hit some things I need
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