Abstract: A system and methods are disclosed for providing independent virtual drives of a hierarchical file system across any number of computers within a Wide Area Network such as the Internet such that the number of directories and files within these file system drives is constrained only by the amount of storage system hardware. The system and methods allow many file system drives to occupy the same storage hardware but be totally independent of each other and uniquely identified and privately accessed by a set of encryption keys. The system and methods store the files in these systems as many separate blocks that are distinguished by a unique identity, encrypted locally on the computer equipment during a write operation and are transferred to different computers for storage across a large Peer-to-Peer network. The system and methods transfer these blocks back and decrypt them locally on the computer equipment and reassemble them to reproduce the original file.