navsection: userguide
title: "How Keep works"
...
+{% comment %}
+Copyright (C) The Arvados Authors. All rights reserved.
+
+SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-3.0
+{% endcomment %}
The Arvados distributed file system is called *Keep*. Keep is a content-addressable file system. This means that files are managed using special unique identifiers derived from the _contents_ of the file (specifically, the MD5 hash), rather than human-assigned file names. This has a number of advantages:
* Files can be stored and replicated across a cluster of servers without requiring a central name server.