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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"
Crappy links in the article. To sign up, er "apply", for the alpha:
http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
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.
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.
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.