BitTorrent Sees Sync Users Share Over 1PB of Data

An anonymous reader writes with an update on the rapid adoption of BitTorrent Lab's Sync tool. From the article: "BitTorrent on Monday announced an impressive milestone for its file synchronization tool Sync: users have synced over 1PB of data. The company says over 70 terabytes are synced via the tool every day. BitTorrent first announced its Sync software back in January and released a private alpha. Between then and April 23, when the company release a public alpha, users synced over 200TB worth of data. In other words, over the past 13 days users have synced over 800TB of data. At this rate, the service will pass 10PB before even hitting a stable release."

Re:How can they possibly know that number?

[UnsignedInt32]

As they are using BitTorrent technology, perhaps the metadata would contain size of data (number of blocks) to be transferred. Considering you can choose to NOT use a tracker, and go DHT (or pre-defined host) only, so probably there are some data transfer that are not accounted in this figure.

Re:Am I misunderstanding this?

[UnsignedInt32]

You only share among people with same shared key. So, no, you are not spreading your encrypted file to other people. At 1:1 it's pretty much direct peer-to-peer transfer. If more nodes are participating, then it can leverage distributed transfers from other nodes that may have part of the whole part of a file.

Re:Am I misunderstanding this?

[monkeyhybrid]

I might be wrong but I was under the understanding that it is primarily aimed at syncing your own data between your own devices (think Dropbox but without a centralised file server). You could choose to sync it with other users but they would then have access to your unencrypted data.

Re:Am I misunderstanding this?

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that your data is only sync'd among your own computers. Specifically, when you create a shared folder, it has an associated secret (random string used as an encryption key), and only computers that have that secret have a copy of the data.

Re:How can they possibly know that number?

[ChristianAverill]

Hi, Christian here from BitTorrent. We updated our post to qualify this. Here is the update: "Sync was built for secure sharing. While we have general statistics about the app, we don’t have any access to private information. The client reports back anonymous usage statistics in the same way our other clients do. Sync uses this call to check if there’s a new build available. This call also contains some anonymous statistics that allow us to understand how Sync performs, and how it’s being used; data transferred directly, through relay, size of folders, and number of files synced. This is the only information we collect, and we left it open intentionally – so that people could see the data we’re collecting. That way, it can be easily verified that we don’t have access to any private information. Read more here: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/17002-btsync-calling-home/ [bittorrent.com] "