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BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0
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.
Fuck the cloud, long live the private puddle!
Well, they are in bikinis, at first.
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.
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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, 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.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.