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:Argh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Zip up the files you want backed up, encrypt with your favourite encryption tool, then put it up on piratebay with a file name something like: Kari_Byron_XXX_PORN_3D.avi
There will be thousands of seeders in an hour.
Truth becomes stranger than fiction. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm reminded of the old joke that if you want you photos/videos/etc backed up in a way that will outlast traditional back up media lifespans, simply upload it to a torrent and let it stay on the Internet being seeded by strangers sharing your stuff.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be stored only on your own devices or on the devices of someone you trust.
securely back up and sync files over the Web, using BitTorrent’s platform as both a backup and shared drive.
Its not meant for wide distribution, just syncing machines with backup copies.
So its not going to be sitting on vary many servers, and the people to whom your reveal/publish the link would be the only people who
would even know about it. Because its all your own storage (in multiple locations) there is no system imposed limit.
Still this would seem to allow sharing of files and warez between consenting users by private seeds.
Re:Argh! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you really have been doing this for years, you may want to go check to see if any seeders are left. Yeah, you could get seeders at first, but once people realize its a bad file they are gone.
But what if you encoded your backup in some real porn movie using steganography! That would be quite interesting.
This is a great thing, really (Score:4, Interesting)
I was hoping to use exactly something like this years ago, when I had to transfer tens of GB to and from Korea every day when I was working at Hammerhead Productions. Using rsync was painfully slow, because TCP/IP required acknowledgement of each packet -- and even though our bandwidth was high, our latency was very long, and we were getting less than 1 Mbps rather than the 10 Mbps we should have been getting.
Using something like BitTorrent, which uses UDP and does the error checking itself asynchronously would have been a huge help. We had multiple cable modems on both ends, and BitTorrent would have been perfect.
In the end, I wrote a simple tool which copied files using scp, but ran 10 threads with 10 separate scp calls and got almost 10 Mbps from each cable modem.
Aspera does similar things at insane prices.