BitTorrent Launches Dropbox Alternative 96
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."
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
This PC mag article [pcmag.com] 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.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
Well I would think it's going to be a local or tunneled set of torrent streams but there's FreeFileSync [sourceforge.net] which works quite well.
Almost perfect (Score:2, Informative)
Wuala had a great P2P storage trading scheme, if you provided 100G to the swarm you got 100G of swarm storage. Then they stuffed it up by capping the storage to 2G unless you pay $n/GB
Wuala missed the greatest opportunity, they should have allowed people in the swarm to trade storage for money and wuala could have taken a cut, say 30% like Apple do. This way the market sets the price per GB, but wuala always gets its cut, if you wanna pay to stor your chemistry homework then fine.
Link to Sign Up (Score:5, Informative)
Crappy links in the article. To sign up, er "apply", for the alpha:
http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html [bittorrent.com]
Not a "DROPBOX" Alternative - File Sync Yes (Score:4, Informative)
This is basically an "open source" version of what http://www.cubby.com/ [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/ [cubby.com] ) 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/ [cubby.com]
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/ [globalscape.com] ) and File Replication Pro ( http://www.filereplicationpro.com/ [filereplicationpro.com] ).
Free with good encryption is a great idea IMO. I for one would use it.