BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0

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Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @08:02PM from the brand-new dept.

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today outlined the company's plans for its file synchronization tool Sync. Next year, the company will launch Sync 2.0, finally taking the product out of beta, as well as three new paid Sync products. Ever since its debut, Sync has provided a wide variety of solutions to various problems, BitTorrent says, from distributing files across remote servers to sharing vacation photos. BitTorrent thus believes it needs to build three distinct products for each of these separate audiences, including a Pro version for $40 per year.

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Vacation photos by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-19 20:18 · Score: 1

Is "distributing files across remote servers to sharing vacation photos" the new "and it can access Daily Stock Quotes!".
I swear I saw that on the box my Commodore 128 came in.
Basically by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-19 20:27 · Score: 4, Funny

Fuck the cloud, long live the private puddle!
1. Re:Basically by satuon · 2014-11-19 21:52 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, I think it's better than trusting everything to someone else's server. This gives you the option to sync using your own hardware. I wonder if you need static IPs though.
2. Re:Basically by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-19 22:24 · Score: 1
  
  You don't need static IPs.
3. Re:Basically by Neil_Brown · 2014-11-19 22:24 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Not quite the same as BitTorrent Sync, but I have used owncloud for a while, as I prefer data to be on my infrastructure where possible. It was easy to set up, although was too slow on a Raspberry Pi to be useable, and I have not had much luck using the default sqlite. Now on a Debian VM with MySQL, and it's running just fine.
  I would not make it publicly accessible, though, as it's just not worth the risk to me, so it only syncs when I am travelling after I have connected to the VPN. However, if you didn't have a static IP, a dynamic DNS service should do the job just fine of making it easily addressable externally.
4. Re:Basically by Bengie · 2014-11-20 01:20 · Score: 2
  
  Not much of a "cloud" if it doesn't support clustering. More like a slew of web services running on a single server. There are some nice services, but Sync allows me to scale with the number of connections.
5. Re:Basically by Voyager529 · 2014-11-20 09:02 · Score: 1
  
  Not much of a "cloud" if it doesn't support clustering.
  
  7.0.2 does support clustering - in theory. In practice, I've only got one device worth using as a server, so I haven't personally tested it out...but clustering is in its entry stages.
  I will say though that OwnCloud is better at syncing phone-> server than BT Sync, as well as sharing files (just give 'em a URL). OwnCloud's shortcoming, at this time, is dealing with large quantities of files. It seems to throw up rather spectacularly if you're syncing a folder with north of 10,000 files, while BT Sync seems to happily do an order of magnitude higher.
  One thing I do like observing from a distance is Pydio, which looks like it has some potential if it can streamline its desktop sync application.
Sharing vacation photos by kruach+aum · 2014-11-19 20:27 · Score: 2

Well, they are in bikinis, at first.
1. Re:Sharing vacation photos by Spy+Handler · 2014-11-19 20:34 · Score: 2
  
  lol I didn't realize sharing vacation photos was such a problem that BT had to come up with a solution better than FB, Picasa etc.
  But then I'm guessing if you were there in person while they made the announcement, you would've seen a "wink wink" after mention of vacation photos.
2. Re:Sharing vacation photos by thegarbz · 2014-11-20 12:33 · Score: 1
  
  lol I didn't realize sharing vacation photos was such a problem that BT had to come up with a solution better than FB, Picasa etc.
  Oh it is. But don't worry BitSync has almost made it difficult enough that we no longer need to put up with boring selfies at the Eiffel Tower.
EFSS by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-19 20:47 · Score: 1

I'd kill for an on-premises Enterprise File Sharing and Sync that integrates with AD that didn't suck. All you find is personal solutions but where is the cool stuff for companies?
1. Re:EFSS by BobBrown4809 · 2014-11-19 21:13 · Score: 2
  
  The company I work for recently tried NoMachine. I know it's not a sync solution, it's mainly for remote access, but you can file share easily between server and client and vice-versa making it a useful way to store important stuff where you want it, ie. not on someone else's cloud. Nomachine integrates with AD as well.
2. Re: EFSS by jgtg32a · 2014-11-20 01:19 · Score: 1
  
  Only 30 dollar signs, is IBM running an early Black Friday sale?
subscription?! by N3x)( · 2014-11-19 21:12 · Score: 1

How in earth do they motivate a subscription model for a service that isn't using the cloud? The whole point of Sync is that it's supposed to only involve your own machines. I have been looking into using sync at work as the Dropbox-possibly-giving-all-your-files-to-the-NSA thing isn't really a good alternative but with Dropbox I atleast get some good cloud backup. Now $40 isn't a lot of money for the intended audience for sure but it implies a lot of DRM/payment processor/Obsoleteness issues down the road. Are there any mature open source projects that are trying to make personal cloud storage?
1. Re:subscription?! by BobBrown4809 · 2014-11-19 21:17 · Score: 1
  
  The service rotates around features available (read the article) plus support. Do you expect free support if you are a company? Do you expect them to provide everything for free?
2. Re:subscription?! by Neil_Brown · 2014-11-19 22:29 · Score: 1
  
  Are there any mature open source projects that are trying to make personal cloud storage?
  I suspect it depends on what "mature" means to you, but owncloud has been around for a little while now, and seems to be updated reasonably regularly. LDAP integration is beta, so it might not be suited to a corporate environment but, for home use, it has been fine for a while (2? 3? years now.)
  There is a plug-in for it, which allows you to encrypt the files at rest within the server, but this did not work so well for me, as it never seemed to finish — I don't think I have a big archive, as it is only about 5GB, but they are mostly small documents (and so a lot of them), rather than images or video. Sync only via https can be forced as an option, which is great, and it works fine with self-generated certificates, after the usual "warning — do you want to trust this" dialogue on setup.
  Since it uses a flat file structure on the server, no reason you could not rsync that to your chosen off-site storage as a cron job if you wanted, else there is a backup module which might do that for you anyway.
3. Re:subscription?! by Voyager529 · 2014-11-20 08:25 · Score: 1
  
  The service rotates around features available (read the article) plus support. Do you expect free support if you are a company? Do you expect them to provide everything for free?
  I can't speak for the GP, but I do agree with him to a significant extent. Allow me to elaborate...
  Dropbox/GDrive/1Drive charges a subscription to keep devices synchronized, as well as a slice of storage space in their datacenter. They pay for bandwidth and hard drives, and forward a chunk of that cost to me. This makes perfect sense. Their advantages are that they are keeping a copy of your data on their hard disks (in the event of a catastrophic failure on your end) and the fact that they don't require all devices to be online concurrently; each device pulls and pushes new stuff when it connects.
  BT Sync's major advantage over these services is essentially the opposite: while devices need to be online concurrently, they don't require a centralized server, though BT Sync provides one for NAT traversal and similar. Even with their tracker and DHT services fully disabled, their bills are a small fraction of Dropbox and friends because they're not actually shuffling data around. But yes, even these cost money. Fine. It's still possible to sync over a LAN, or a slightly-configured WAN connection, without ever touching their servers.
  I'm completely fine with them needing to charge for the software - it's a great utility that I really like. Neither the summary nor the article do a good job at explaining what would be the difference between the free and paid version. "Support" is a great answer, and I'm definitely in favor of that. However, is it *only* support? The nature of this program means that per-device licenses get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. I've got a few friends who sync to my FreeNAS. If it's $40/year/device, that's $360/year...and they only "support" I've ever needed involved Google searching and feature requests in the forums. $40/node for a perpetual license is a smidge steep, but I'd be somewhat-more-willing to pay it...but the annual price tag is on par with other services that offer storage and lots more bandwidth usage, making Sync a whole lot less competitive. The fact that it's a subscription cost with no clear benefit over simply keeping the older versions running, or using an alternative application, is a viable concern.
  tl;dr: no one owes me anything for free, but the cost their looking for isn't matched with a good comparison against either their current free offering or competing products that have a known and significantly higher overhead.
Re:FOSS solution available by tyroneking · 2014-11-19 22:27 · Score: 3, Informative

In fact SyncThing has recently de-merged with Pulse and is now back on it's own (see https://discourse.syncthing.ne...). Probably a good thing because Pulse is part of ind.ie (https://ind.ie/about/) which is a little too off-beat, even for me.
That being said, there's also Git-Annex Assistant (many people - on HN - swear by it, but I can never get it to work), Syncany, Filement, Sparkleshare - all decent sync solutions - though I think all lack the encryption & simple setup of BTSync.
I always end up with Unison + SSH.
Re:No distributed storage? by Kjella · 2014-11-19 22:28 · Score: 2

So there's no torrent then providing a pseudo cloud across many users' devices which would maintain the file? It's not like Freenet or other distributed storage p2p solutions? Ie it's not like bittorrent at all?
No, they're just pointing out that if you want to use it as a "private cloud" to sync your own files between your own devices you need a seed. Let's for example say you have a cell phone, a tablet and a laptop and they're on and off at different times then BT Sync only works when several of them are online and depending on setup, I wouldn't want my cell phone to try pulling down everything on my laptop. Not like iCloud or whatever where your cell phone can upload photos to "the cloud" while your tablet and laptop is off.

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Re:FOSS solution available by doti · 2014-11-19 22:32 · Score: 1

Nice, but... do they have an Android app too?

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Peer discovery by simplypeachy · 2014-11-19 22:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

BitTorrent operate global discovery servers and the synced directories can also use DHT if enabled, both of which mean that static IPs are not required. Syncs can also be operated without either of these - they can use LAN discovery and a list of static hosts.
Yay by BlackHawk-666 · 2014-11-20 00:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yay, finally I can stop enjoying the 100GB of free cloud storage that Google provide me, and instead pay $40 / year for no storage at all and the need to provide my own servers :D
I suppose there'll be a free version for people who don't need the "support". I'm just wondering who the pro version is targeted at.

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1. Re:Yay by shineyboy · 2014-11-20 04:15 · Score: 1
  
  I use BitTorrent Sync heavily at work for transferring extremely large files daily with a variety of external vendors in China, India, and Sweden. The cloud storage costs would be astronomical with the amount of data I'm syncing, and Google services generally don't work in China without a lot of headaches. And that's to say nothing of all the company-specific IT security and permissions I have to navigate to transfer files reliably and get them when I need them. BitTorrent Sync has always basically just worked with very little headache. I'm a huge fan, and have used it since it launched and watched it improve steadily over time.
2. Re:Yay by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2014-11-20 05:47 · Score: 1
  
  Yay, most Bittorrent Sync things are still free, only some new features will have a cost (and only some, not all new things will have a cost). Yay, i control my data,and have a cheap hard drive, or even a NAS at home anyway, now that's able to be synced all over. Yay, I don't need to worry about Dropbox or Google rummaging through my data to sell me things.
  There are a lot of cool things about Bittorrent Sync. Most of the new things will still be free. Yeah, it may or may not fit what you want, but there are always tradeoffs. I have both Drive and Bittorrent Sync on my devices, and keep different thigns in both.
3. Re:Yay by Fwipp · 2014-11-20 07:21 · Score: 1
  
  Does IT know you're running bittorrent code on their network?
  Couldn't they just set you up with an FTP site?
4. Re:Yay by shineyboy · 2014-11-25 03:24 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, IT is fully aware, and they even set it up for me after I requested permission and pitched BitTorrent Sync's merits. My role has me working with anywhere from 20 to 60 external vendors at a time and transferring massive files that are stored on the network, and that's not something I could sneak by IT. ;) Besides, I respect IT enormously, and I vet absolutely everything involving network security and resource considerations by them before I do anything.
  I also have an FTP, but only as a backup. In my role, I'm dealing with several gigs of transfers per day that need to be individually reviewed, and all of the files are coming from majorly offset time zones like China and India. The end of their day when they submit their work is roughly the beginning of mine, and vice versa. With an FTP, I have to manually trigger a download that may take all day to complete. If the files for review don't finish transferring until 5pm, my artists and I will be rushing to try to review the work before we go home and before my overseas teams get online. With BitTorrent Sync, the files are already synced by the time I get into work. That's 4 to 8 hours of time savings per day, which is hugely important to the schedules I'm working with.
Untrustworthy by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-20 01:51 · Score: 1

I used to be a big fan of BtSync, but lately the whole project just started to seem a bit too shifty for my taste.
Despite numerous promises, they never published a detailed description of the protocol. It's still unclear how secure a lot of the mechanisms really are.
For instance, how is the search for another share accomplished? Does it expose your hash to others? Are files encrypted in transmission? What information do relays have access to? Who is acting as a relay? Can I unknowingly be acting as a relay just by running the software (Skype used to do this)?
Yes, they have.
Discovery is accomplished by default by hashing the encryption key, then sending it to thier servers. Anyone having he same hash are connected. Can also disable this behaviour and use specified IPs, peer sharing and DHTs.
You expose your hashed key to bittorrent via this (optionally). Files are encrypted into transmission. I think they have said AES. Relays don't exist unless you mean the discovery servers which have a hash of the key. No one is acting as a relay unless you are part of that particular sharing using a particular key. You do not relay for other shares.
Re:No distributed storage? by nine-times · 2014-11-20 02:14 · Score: 2

That said, the functionality that I've been hoping for pretty much since I heard about Bittorrent Sync is the ability to use this as a sort of distributed file system with a desired level of redundancy. So, for example, it be great if I could buy a bunch of consumer-level NAS devices with a few terabytes each, stash them in various places (friends and family's houses, wherever), and say, "I want every unit of information to be stored on at least 4 of the devices". Not necessarily 4, but however redundant you'd like it to be, based on your need for reliability and the reliability of your individual nodes.
If you could do that, then you could build your own scalable, redundant, reliable, fast Dropbox replacement on your own hardware without a single point of failure.
Open it up yet? by stewsters · 2014-11-20 02:22 · Score: 1

Will it be open source yet? Because this is pretty nice: http://syncthing.net/
Bittorrent Sync is not bittorrent protocol by Danathar · 2014-11-20 03:15 · Score: 1

Just an FYI...
Bittorrent Sync does not use the bittorrent protocol.
Re:FOSS solution available by WuphonsReach · 2014-11-20 10:00 · Score: 1

I'd argue for Seafile as another option. It does what it says on the tin (file sharing / sync) and does it well.

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Re:No distributed storage? by Bengie · 2014-11-20 11:01 · Score: 1

It is like BitTorrent in that is primarily uses the BT protocol. The problem is why would I want to host your files? Sync allows you to setup "shares" among your computers. While this doesn't help much with increasing bandwidth from your home, you can also setup shares with your friends. This means your friends download your files and help distribute them. Of course everything is encrypted. By default, your friends can't see your files, but you can share with them a key to allow read or read-write access.
Re:FOSS solution available by tyroneking · 2014-11-20 21:29 · Score: 1

Yeah you're right - BTSync is the easiest to setup and if I hadn't worked out how to use Unison many years ago I'd probably be using it now.
Re:FOSS solution available by hoggoth · 2014-11-21 04:42 · Score: 1

> if your software product confuses someone with almost 20 years of experience in computing, you're doing it wrong
Speaking of which... Software developer with over 20 years of experience here... I tried to figure out iTunes WTF?! How can they make something so confusing? I just wanted to take 10 mp3s and put them on my daughters iphone. "If you continue I will erase everything on the iphone"...?!?! nope nope nope nope...

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