Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing.
One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?
And I've told a few photographers about this, and a few weeks later a friend of a friend of a friend excitedly told me on a forum how you can photo share in Dropbox.
And what I'm basically seeing is that the problem of "file sync" is being considered as solved by lay consumers, who really aren't prioritising encryption, and the problems that they now have is "share this directory of photos", and "share that directory of videos", and "sync this music privately, but let me play it back".
Dropbox isn't just file sync anymore.
What it is, is a serious threat to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Amazon MP3 Locker, Google Play Music, iTunes, etc.
And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security.
Sharing photos was solved for the 99% by Facebook & Apple & Google. If you're a photographer with gobs of high resolution photos Dropbox is perfect for you, but I imagine that is a niche pain point.
What is a much bigger opportunity is a way that easily lets groups share music and movies. This cannot be solved by a centralized service like Dropbox for legal reasons. This is what would concern me if I was Dropbox; BTSync's killer feature is off limits to Dropbox without a complete change in architecture (and some soul searching about if they want to risk ending up like Kim Dotcom).
> And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security.
I have a use case that is pretty common among my peer group and BT Sync has been the best solution I've been able to find. In a nutshell, I need to sync large datasets across multiple computers.
Dropbox: expensive
AeroFS: buggy, used too much bandwidth, and slow
Sparkleshare: uses git which chokes on large files
Git Annex Assistant: didn't work reliably on mac
rsync/duplicity/unison: needs extra logic for detecting file changes
I also think the "Dropbox replacement" idea is a strawman created by the TorrentFreak article. I've never had the impression that BT Sync is trying to replace Dropbox. It is just trying to do p2p sync with a great interface and some nice features such as read-only and one-time secrets.
> I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos.
Why is this a problem with Flickr? I am generally shooting high res full frame, and post to Flickr. I have about a terabyte of images. There's no 100GB storage limit, just an annual flat fee.
Family can download full resolution images for printing. My grandmother can have my Flickr Photo Stream as a screensaver in her TV. I also enjoy fantastic two way integration with photo management tools, with tagging syncing back.
I can't see why I'd pay Dropbox considerably more for less features.
(What's more, if Flickr doesn't like a public photo's content, the worst that will happen is getting marked "not in public search areas", with an easy redress to get reinstated. It's unclear to me what Dropbox will do. Meanwhile, if Google doesn't like a public photo, I can lose my Google Account, as photogs have found to their chagrin.)
I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution.
I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution.
I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.
The only things that really keeps me from sharing photos via dropbox is
a) I use my picassa photo albums for big dumps of regular photos I take when out and about, the storage is big enough I don't have to pay anything (yet) and I have thousands upon thousands of photos there
b) I use my flickr account (paid so unlimited) to put up photos I've curated and cleaned up and processed and stuck on a map someplace and given a detailed description of...basically I use it as a detailed travelog of places I've been. I'm about 4 years behind on it to be honest, but the flickr uploadr let's me bulk upload and getting things into the account currently isn't the bottleneck in my proces
Dropbox's core offering boils down to file sync + cloud sync. There's many use cases where that's what you want - access on whatever devices you have the app installed on, and also over the web.
Cloud sync leads to storage limits (which don't make sense as a consumer for file sync, but are necessary for large scale cloud sync) and centralisation (desirable for vast access, not so much for some situations).
BT sync isn't a Dropbox replacement, it's a file sync replacement that's superior in some ways, but lacks the benefits of being combined with cloud sync.
> Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?
Uhm... how about the 200 GB plan? Or the 400 GB plan. Or 1 TB for $49.99/month? Or you could contact sales about Google Cloud Storage: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-storage Or you could just buy S3 storage.
Actually, there are literally dozens (to maybe even hundreds) of alternatives for hosting static content for less money for more bandwidth.
I pretty much agree. Correct me if I'm wrong but Dropbox were the first to have come up with Camera Upload feature, which basically makes any average user go trouble free with their cellphones, tablets, snapping away photographs knowing that they will be ready on their desktop to view if they want to.
Google+ does that too now, but this is in fact a killer feature which has been adopted well by the average folks out there. So yes, Dropbox is not just about file sharing anymore.
I know this may not be practical depending on the amount of space required, but you could probably run a very cheap EC2 image with a huge EBS volume attached for a year for cheaper than the bigger Dropbox offerings.
For example, a micro instance, with 500GB of EBS storage, with allowance for 1% data growth per daily snapshot (S3 backed), and 50GB of transfer per month will apparently cost $175.68.
The 500GB plan from Dropbox will cost you $499 .
I'm thinking, with enough data, Bittorrent Sync wins the pricing war, and I've been doing some testing on the client and it seems really resilient to data changing while syncing etc.
It's nice to be able to rollback/undelete files. Plus everyone is forgetting that Dropbox snagged Audiogalaxy a while back, so I'm expecting to be able to stream music back to myself from my Dropbox at some point as a service.
I just moved a bunch of stuff to btsync to mess with it but I still need to find a place offsite to keep it in addition if I want it to replace Dropbox. I'll likely use both tools in combination.
FWIW this product fits my use case perfectly. I want to sync lots of data, but I don't want to pay for Dropbox because I really, really don't care if my stuff gets into the "cloud". I just want it across machines. Currently I use AeroFS, but this looks spiffy and might find a home on my hard drive.
If you are a photographer, Our Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) solution is simply perfect. It is not expensive as dropbox, and no storage limits, supports variety of photo formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF, CR2, NEF, CRW and more). As dropbox, we have good mobile apps for all the popular platforms. Pretty much majority of our paid users are photographers.
I've been using BitTorrent Sync for the past week. For the use case of sharing large files, it obliterates Dropbox, AeroFS, and Cubby.
It distributes the files intelligently and makes optimal use of everyone's bandwidth. Dropbox, for example, slowly uploads all files to the cloud before distributing them, plus there's the space issue. AeroFS allows unlimited space, but is far slower than my Internet and LAN speeds allow, and does things like trying to upload the same file, linearly, to every peer at once. Cubby has limited space and has the same slow syncing problems.
I'm running BitTorrent Sync on my 6 year old Windows 7 Thinkpad, a newer Windows 8 desktop, a Digital Ocean Ubuntu VPS, and a Synology DS110j NAS. It runs perfectly on all of the above, and provides a useful web interface for the VPS and NAS.
If you already have a Synology box, what do you get with BS versus using Synology's own CloudStation? I've looked into BS, but I guess I'm not getting what I gain running it on my DS410.
The wheel of reincarnation I'm referring to in this case is the cycling between a mainframe/thin-client architecture and a PC-based distributed architecture.
In ye olde days it was mainframes and dumb terminals. Then it was PCs and LANs/the Internet. Then it was web browsers and tablets (dumb terminal 2.0) and The Cloud (mainframe 2.0). Now the wheel is turning once again...
The cloud is great as long as I don't care who owns my data, want to pay constantly for hosting it (or put up with arbitrary and changeable limits), have no privacy, lose my data when a startup goes out of business, etc.
Get a "dumb" laptop with plenty of horsepower/space, sign in to something and sync everything over (chef/puppet/btsync/dropbox), do a bunch of work locally, then wipe the laptop.
I'd love to have my whole laptop identity work that way. It's sort of possible now but it takes forever to convert all your data and apps over to that approach.
This seems ideal for the enterprise use case, in particular because it's extremely performant, secure, and doesn't require a central/third-party server (e.g. AWS). The 'must always be online' requirement is actually a plus, not a minus for that crowd. Enterprises are generally very concerned about being able to revoke access to a given resource instantaneously. Any app that stores local copies complicates that quite a bit.
People will dismiss this as 'a toy that geeks use', but as Chris Dixon has noted, 'what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years' [1]
Looking at some of the examples, I'm starting to see a future where people trade entirely in hashes - send some amount of bitcoins to address X, receive access to read-only access to bittorrent folder Y which is automatically populated with the latest TV episodes for a series, etc. Any idea how to apply that sort of anonymity and convenience to the real world though? Scanning QR codes with a phone seems to be the best so far, still more fiddly than cash though...
So now you have in place all the bits you need for a "members only" netnews feed, someone should go dig up the code and create a 'news' sync'd document. If you played your cards right you could use off the shelf news readers that look into a local repo of the news.
With just a tiny bit of crypto code you could add a repudiation feature (keys signed by the secret vs the secret itself) and control access to both individual groups and individual users.
Just to make the connection for others, you are describing something that can be used for chat AND binaries. As ugly a hack as it might be, (speaking to the choir, I know) there is tremendous value in simply being able to move messages (in this case, as simple files), between buddies without needing an "account" with a "service" (of the type that motivates people to excessively use "quotes").
>BitTorrent Sync’s functionality is comparable to services such as Dropbox and Skydrive, except for the fact that there’s no cloud involved. Users sync the files between their own computers and no third-party has access to it.
> It is an ideal tool for people who want to share large amounts of data between computers without going through third-party services.
>The Sync application is available for Windows, OSX, Linux and has the ability run on NAS devices through a web-interface. Readers who are interested in giving it a spin can head over to BitTorrent labs [1], where the Sync app can be downloaded.
I'm more interested in the TLDR of how this works. Due to firewalls and such, it's technically impossible to have a peer to peer network without requiring port forwarding on at least one side. I wonder if they're really requiring that from users that want to use this.
Another way would be to do TCP or UDP hole punching, but that involves a third party for initial setup. Probably possible and probably safe, but I'd like to see a security review of that.
The "Dropbox Alternative" marketing line seems to really be what's confusing people... this is not Dropbox.
You have to have a source always online, there's no third party service sitting in the cloud syncing all of your computers, it passes that responsibilty onto the user. That said, I'm surprised they aren't trying to "consumerize" this into a hardware product.
Space Monkey has seen a ton of success recently and are well beyond their funding goal on Kickstarter(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-tak...). The thing that immediately came to mind for me is that this is really a job for Bittorrent.
A NAS device makes complete sense and if they could build a better experience around that, similar to what Space Monkey is doing, seems like a huge opportunity.
Is this the first time that a product has been launched with the primary motivation of showing that a particular protocol is good for things other illegal filesharing?
Up until now BitTorrent aficionados have tended to be forced back to the "I use it for Linux distros" when defending the protocol against ISPs and businesses looking to shape or block BT traffic.
If this takes off, then the "its only used for nefarious purposes" argument will be much harder to make.
I suspect that this is the real reason it's being launched - not that that's a bad thing.
We're looking at AeroFS and BitTorrent Sync for sharing sensitive files with our team members. We're leaning towards BS mainly because this feels completely P2P, whereas AeroFS may become useless if the company shuts down. Is that right? I'd love to hear from someone who has used both of these about stability, sync conflicts, CPU load etc. Also would love to hear about plans to open source BS.
It seems like the next step is for someone to attach a NAS to a RasPi and make a "syncbox" -- a NAS which auto-syncs to the other NASes you've configured across the internet.
For end users, they would get 2 and share a secret between them, then install one at 2 separate offices (or home and office), and any files dumped onto one NAS are replicated to the other. Basically Dropbox without file limits.
Since there is no central server, doesn't that mean that one device will have to be always on? That would add a degree of overhead and complication that services like Dropbox don't have.
They have a native linux 64bit client, that's great! The linux binary is cli only, but provides a web interface on port 8888. However, the daemon binds to address 0.0.0.0 and not just localhost (127.0.0.1 or ::1)! So make sure you have a firewall. Otherwise everybody can access the web interface and thus your secrets.
What I think will be an interesting use case for this technology is public file sharing.
If I want to share files with the general public I could just give them a read-only key and then they'll have a folder that syncs with whatever files I put into it. It's a new way of content distribution.
Will this be how people distribute music and TV shows?
Will this be the way people subscribe to content in the future?
I could be a game developer, and I could give my users a read-only key to download my game and at the same time they'll receive any updates I make to the game when I update the files in the folder.
This is great; however, folks can still securely store data on cloud services. They just need to take a Trust No one (TNO) approach and encrypt their data to disk.
For example you can use TrueCrypt and create/mount a drive volume that is fully encrypted while synced across a file share storage/sync service like DropBox.
The only downside is that you have to install the TrueCrypt application on your client device, which does limit is platform offering (currently, no mobile).
Wish the source was made available, I have an OpenIndiana server with several 1 TB drives running ZFS and I would love to use something like this... but only binaries are available.
I got in on the closed Alpha just last week, and it immediately fit into a use case I had where I needed to sync a folder on an OSX machine with a remote linux server. SFTP would have worked in this use case just as well, except it can be janky to slot into a non-developer's workflow.
Long story short, I setup BS on both machines with an absolute minimum of fuss, copied the password over, and the folder synced. Definitely does one thing and does it well.
Ok, now make it totally decentralized and peer-to-peer, with a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin used to automatically pay peers that replicate your data on an ongoing basis.
There are lots of hard problems to be solved in such a system (mostly dealing with the lack of trust), but I think it would be totally badass.
Dropbox is the only cloud sync client that I've found so far that has decent support for hosting TrueCrypt containers. It's unfortunate that my particular use case is so narrow because I can't really consider something to be a dropbox replacement unless it:
1) has a fully supported client on Windows, OS X and Linux
2) has that capability to sync with mobile devices
3) uses the native file system apis available on each platform to avoid doing scans on large numbers of files looking for changes by the last modified timestamp (so I don't have to disable the TrueCrypt feature that avoids updating the timestamp on containers)
4) transmits only the changed content of the file instead of the entire file (so I don't have to transmit the entire TrueCrypt container when only some blocks in the container have been modified)
Has anyone ran across a service that would allow me to utilize TrueCrypt volumes as easily as DropBox does across the major desktop operating systems?
[+] [-] buro9|13 years ago|reply
One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?
Hello Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sc/um5zf95urdk3zmg/2SaSCUIQd8
And I've told a few photographers about this, and a few weeks later a friend of a friend of a friend excitedly told me on a forum how you can photo share in Dropbox.
And what I'm basically seeing is that the problem of "file sync" is being considered as solved by lay consumers, who really aren't prioritising encryption, and the problems that they now have is "share this directory of photos", and "share that directory of videos", and "sync this music privately, but let me play it back".
Dropbox isn't just file sync anymore.
What it is, is a serious threat to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Amazon MP3 Locker, Google Play Music, iTunes, etc.
And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security.
[+] [-] nostromo|13 years ago|reply
What is a much bigger opportunity is a way that easily lets groups share music and movies. This cannot be solved by a centralized service like Dropbox for legal reasons. This is what would concern me if I was Dropbox; BTSync's killer feature is off limits to Dropbox without a complete change in architecture (and some soul searching about if they want to risk ending up like Kim Dotcom).
[+] [-] k2enemy|13 years ago|reply
I have a use case that is pretty common among my peer group and BT Sync has been the best solution I've been able to find. In a nutshell, I need to sync large datasets across multiple computers.
Dropbox: expensive
AeroFS: buggy, used too much bandwidth, and slow
Sparkleshare: uses git which chokes on large files
Git Annex Assistant: didn't work reliably on mac
rsync/duplicity/unison: needs extra logic for detecting file changes
I also think the "Dropbox replacement" idea is a strawman created by the TorrentFreak article. I've never had the impression that BT Sync is trying to replace Dropbox. It is just trying to do p2p sync with a great interface and some nice features such as read-only and one-time secrets.
[+] [-] Terretta|13 years ago|reply
Why is this a problem with Flickr? I am generally shooting high res full frame, and post to Flickr. I have about a terabyte of images. There's no 100GB storage limit, just an annual flat fee.
Family can download full resolution images for printing. My grandmother can have my Flickr Photo Stream as a screensaver in her TV. I also enjoy fantastic two way integration with photo management tools, with tagging syncing back.
I can't see why I'd pay Dropbox considerably more for less features.
(What's more, if Flickr doesn't like a public photo's content, the worst that will happen is getting marked "not in public search areas", with an easy redress to get reinstated. It's unclear to me what Dropbox will do. Meanwhile, if Google doesn't like a public photo, I can lose my Google Account, as photogs have found to their chagrin.)
[+] [-] lifeguard|13 years ago|reply
I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution.
I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.
[+] [-] bane|13 years ago|reply
a) I use my picassa photo albums for big dumps of regular photos I take when out and about, the storage is big enough I don't have to pay anything (yet) and I have thousands upon thousands of photos there
b) I use my flickr account (paid so unlimited) to put up photos I've curated and cleaned up and processed and stuck on a map someplace and given a detailed description of...basically I use it as a detailed travelog of places I've been. I'm about 4 years behind on it to be honest, but the flickr uploadr let's me bulk upload and getting things into the account currently isn't the bottleneck in my proces
[+] [-] muyuu|13 years ago|reply
Dropbox for privacy minded people if you will.
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|13 years ago|reply
Cloud sync leads to storage limits (which don't make sense as a consumer for file sync, but are necessary for large scale cloud sync) and centralisation (desirable for vast access, not so much for some situations).
BT sync isn't a Dropbox replacement, it's a file sync replacement that's superior in some ways, but lacks the benefits of being combined with cloud sync.
[+] [-] GilbertErik|13 years ago|reply
Uhm... how about the 200 GB plan? Or the 400 GB plan. Or 1 TB for $49.99/month? Or you could contact sales about Google Cloud Storage: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-storage Or you could just buy S3 storage.
Actually, there are literally dozens (to maybe even hundreds) of alternatives for hosting static content for less money for more bandwidth.
[+] [-] webwanderings|13 years ago|reply
Google+ does that too now, but this is in fact a killer feature which has been adopted well by the average folks out there. So yes, Dropbox is not just about file sharing anymore.
[+] [-] andrethegiant|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afterburner|13 years ago|reply
I need a solution for on the order of 40,000... for which Flickr is perfect, since there is no storage limit, just a very small flat fee.
[+] [-] taude|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Intermernet|13 years ago|reply
For example, a micro instance, with 500GB of EBS storage, with allowance for 1% data growth per daily snapshot (S3 backed), and 50GB of transfer per month will apparently cost $175.68.
The 500GB plan from Dropbox will cost you $499 .
I'm thinking, with enough data, Bittorrent Sync wins the pricing war, and I've been doing some testing on the client and it seems really resilient to data changing while syncing etc.
[+] [-] jcastro|13 years ago|reply
It's nice to be able to rollback/undelete files. Plus everyone is forgetting that Dropbox snagged Audiogalaxy a while back, so I'm expecting to be able to stream music back to myself from my Dropbox at some point as a service.
I just moved a bunch of stuff to btsync to mess with it but I still need to find a place offsite to keep it in addition if I want it to replace Dropbox. I'll likely use both tools in combination.
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronnier|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeformed|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tteam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uses|13 years ago|reply
It distributes the files intelligently and makes optimal use of everyone's bandwidth. Dropbox, for example, slowly uploads all files to the cloud before distributing them, plus there's the space issue. AeroFS allows unlimited space, but is far slower than my Internet and LAN speeds allow, and does things like trying to upload the same file, linearly, to every peer at once. Cubby has limited space and has the same slow syncing problems.
I'm running BitTorrent Sync on my 6 year old Windows 7 Thinkpad, a newer Windows 8 desktop, a Digital Ocean Ubuntu VPS, and a Synology DS110j NAS. It runs perfectly on all of the above, and provides a useful web interface for the VPS and NAS.
[+] [-] evanw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelandbatey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikepurvis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] api|13 years ago|reply
http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...
The wheel of reincarnation I'm referring to in this case is the cycling between a mainframe/thin-client architecture and a PC-based distributed architecture.
In ye olde days it was mainframes and dumb terminals. Then it was PCs and LANs/the Internet. Then it was web browsers and tablets (dumb terminal 2.0) and The Cloud (mainframe 2.0). Now the wheel is turning once again...
The cloud is great as long as I don't care who owns my data, want to pay constantly for hosting it (or put up with arbitrary and changeable limits), have no privacy, lose my data when a startup goes out of business, etc.
[+] [-] tunesmith|13 years ago|reply
Get a "dumb" laptop with plenty of horsepower/space, sign in to something and sync everything over (chef/puppet/btsync/dropbox), do a bunch of work locally, then wipe the laptop.
I'd love to have my whole laptop identity work that way. It's sort of possible now but it takes forever to convert all your data and apps over to that approach.
[+] [-] pm90|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goronbjorn|13 years ago|reply
People will dismiss this as 'a toy that geeks use', but as Chris Dixon has noted, 'what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years' [1]
[1] http://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on-...
[+] [-] Shish2k|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
With just a tiny bit of crypto code you could add a repudiation feature (keys signed by the secret vs the secret itself) and control access to both individual groups and individual users.
[+] [-] vy8vWJlco|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|13 years ago|reply
>BitTorrent Sync’s functionality is comparable to services such as Dropbox and Skydrive, except for the fact that there’s no cloud involved. Users sync the files between their own computers and no third-party has access to it.
> It is an ideal tool for people who want to share large amounts of data between computers without going through third-party services.
>The Sync application is available for Windows, OSX, Linux and has the ability run on NAS devices through a web-interface. Readers who are interested in giving it a spin can head over to BitTorrent labs [1], where the Sync app can be downloaded.
[1]: http://labs.bittorrent.com/
[+] [-] lucb1e|13 years ago|reply
Another way would be to do TCP or UDP hole punching, but that involves a third party for initial setup. Probably possible and probably safe, but I'd like to see a security review of that.
[+] [-] thisisrobv|13 years ago|reply
You have to have a source always online, there's no third party service sitting in the cloud syncing all of your computers, it passes that responsibilty onto the user. That said, I'm surprised they aren't trying to "consumerize" this into a hardware product.
Space Monkey has seen a ton of success recently and are well beyond their funding goal on Kickstarter(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-tak...). The thing that immediately came to mind for me is that this is really a job for Bittorrent.
A NAS device makes complete sense and if they could build a better experience around that, similar to what Space Monkey is doing, seems like a huge opportunity.
[+] [-] Angostura|13 years ago|reply
Up until now BitTorrent aficionados have tended to be forced back to the "I use it for Linux distros" when defending the protocol against ISPs and businesses looking to shape or block BT traffic.
If this takes off, then the "its only used for nefarious purposes" argument will be much harder to make.
I suspect that this is the real reason it's being launched - not that that's a bad thing.
[+] [-] namityadav|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengillie|13 years ago|reply
It seems like the next step is for someone to attach a NAS to a RasPi and make a "syncbox" -- a NAS which auto-syncs to the other NASes you've configured across the internet.
For end users, they would get 2 and share a secret between them, then install one at 2 separate offices (or home and office), and any files dumped onto one NAS are replicated to the other. Basically Dropbox without file limits.
[+] [-] slg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wereHamster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshaidan|13 years ago|reply
If I want to share files with the general public I could just give them a read-only key and then they'll have a folder that syncs with whatever files I put into it. It's a new way of content distribution.
Will this be how people distribute music and TV shows?
Will this be the way people subscribe to content in the future?
I could be a game developer, and I could give my users a read-only key to download my game and at the same time they'll receive any updates I make to the game when I update the files in the folder.
[+] [-] weej|13 years ago|reply
For example you can use TrueCrypt and create/mount a drive volume that is fully encrypted while synced across a file share storage/sync service like DropBox.
The only downside is that you have to install the TrueCrypt application on your client device, which does limit is platform offering (currently, no mobile).
http://www.truecrypt.org/
[+] [-] X-Istence|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notdonspaulding|13 years ago|reply
Long story short, I setup BS on both machines with an absolute minimum of fuss, copied the password over, and the folder synced. Definitely does one thing and does it well.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|13 years ago|reply
There are lots of hard problems to be solved in such a system (mostly dealing with the lack of trust), but I think it would be totally badass.
[+] [-] solarkennedy|13 years ago|reply
The config file is versatile enough to allow you to turn off the relay servers / dht / upnp, etc and simply declare static peers, which is cool.
[+] [-] alyandon|13 years ago|reply
1) has a fully supported client on Windows, OS X and Linux
2) has that capability to sync with mobile devices
3) uses the native file system apis available on each platform to avoid doing scans on large numbers of files looking for changes by the last modified timestamp (so I don't have to disable the TrueCrypt feature that avoids updating the timestamp on containers)
4) transmits only the changed content of the file instead of the entire file (so I don't have to transmit the entire TrueCrypt container when only some blocks in the container have been modified)
Has anyone ran across a service that would allow me to utilize TrueCrypt volumes as easily as DropBox does across the major desktop operating systems?