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BitTorrent Launches Dropbox Alternative
redletterdave writes "On Friday morning, BitTorrent launched the alpha test of a new, free public service called BitTorrent Sync, which allows users to securely back up and sync files over the Web using BitTorrent's platform. Unlike competing services such as Box or Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync doesn't store files on remote servers (which means that no third party has access to one's files), and also has no storage limits other than what your devices can hold."
I can't find any seeders for my chemistry homework!
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Maybe it is stored 'on the network' by keeping the packets in the air constantly. If you can't beat bufferbloat, might as well make use of it for storage.
This PC mag article has a bit more info. Apparently the "unlimited storage" means whatever your phone or PC can hold.
So it looks like what it's doing is syncing files between your devices... or backing up your phone to your PC (if you wanna look at it that way), via the internet and using BT protocol... so you don't have to plug a USB cable from your phone to PC.
ROFLMAO or seed it as Child Porn and have the government back it up for you.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Well I would think it's going to be a local or tunneled set of torrent streams but there's FreeFileSync which works quite well.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Wuala had a great P2P storage trading scheme, if you provided 100G to the swarm you got 100G of swarm storage. Then they stuffed it up by capping the storage to 2G unless you pay $n/GB
Wuala missed the greatest opportunity, they should have allowed people in the swarm to trade storage for money and wuala could have taken a cut, say 30% like Apple do. This way the market sets the price per GB, but wuala always gets its cut, if you wanna pay to stor your chemistry homework then fine.
Crappy links in the article. To sign up, er "apply", for the alpha:
http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
I don't think the data is stored anywhere except on the owner's devices. From what I can tell, the point is to sync data across devices, not to have "cloud" storage for your data. It performs the same sync function as Dropbox, without the cloud storage part. It is true that there are other ways to do this (e.g. Owncloud, mentioned by another poster). Bittorrent might have certain advantages, especially if you have the data synced with many different devices. If they can make it as simple as Dropbox, then I would be interested. I don't really need Dropbox's cloud storage, they just make it really easy to sync across many platforms.
I'm reminded of the old joke that if you want you photos/videos/etc backed up in a way that will outlast traditional back up media lifespans, simply upload it to a torrent and let it stay on the Internet being seeded by strangers sharing your stuff.
It would be stored only on your own devices or on the devices of someone you trust.
securely back up and sync files over the Web, using BitTorrent’s platform as both a backup and shared drive.
Its not meant for wide distribution, just syncing machines with backup copies.
So its not going to be sitting on vary many servers, and the people to whom your reveal/publish the link would be the only people who
would even know about it. Because its all your own storage (in multiple locations) there is no system imposed limit.
Still this would seem to allow sharing of files and warez between consenting users by private seeds.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
did you miss the part about not storing on 3rd party servers and having no storage limits?
on an Amazon server and have as much storage as you want
Well, one, hosting is not cheap, particularly if you are storage intensive. Having owncloud from the home is a solution around this... but fundamentally it represents a centralized model where you have a likely single point of failure. Your owncloud instance could be killed and all associated devices would be in a pickle.
My assumption with this is that it is more decentralized. Meaning that it's more natural to reach a state where no particular instance is considered more important than others.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is basically an "open source" version of what http://www.cubby.com/ did in their free beta--but is now a paid part of the service. It was called "DirectSync" ( https://www.cubby.com/features/ ) and didn't use any of the "cloud" part of storage from the service. You can see how it is now part of the paid service here: https://www.cubby.com/pricing/
I would expect any number of other providers are looking at this for a paid service. High end versions would include Globalscape's WAFS ( http://www.globalscape.com/wafs/ ) and File Replication Pro ( http://www.filereplicationpro.com/ ).
Free with good encryption is a great idea IMO. I for one would use it.
...by storing them on my own storage? Brilliant!!!!!
This isn't really anything groundbreaking technologically speaking
i don't know if you call it groundbreaking, but it's fundamentally different that other file sync solutions because your data is not stored on a server somewhere. seems like a neat idea for folks that are nervous about having their data sitting out there in the cloud.
I was hoping to use exactly something like this years ago, when I had to transfer tens of GB to and from Korea every day when I was working at Hammerhead Productions. Using rsync was painfully slow, because TCP/IP required acknowledgement of each packet -- and even though our bandwidth was high, our latency was very long, and we were getting less than 1 Mbps rather than the 10 Mbps we should have been getting.
Using something like BitTorrent, which uses UDP and does the error checking itself asynchronously would have been a huge help. We had multiple cable modems on both ends, and BitTorrent would have been perfect.
In the end, I wrote a simple tool which copied files using scp, but ran 10 threads with 10 separate scp calls and got almost 10 Mbps from each cable modem.
Aspera does similar things at insane prices.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
If it is not stored somewhere on the internet, then both your devices must be online to be able to share. It is not different from using sftp or https or any other direct protocol that can transfer files. And I doubt that bittorrent is the most efficient one for that. But their real reason is probably to increase legitimate bittorrent use, to make it harder for ISP's to block it.