BitTorrent Opens Up Its Sync Alpha To the Public For Windows, Mac, and Linux 49
An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent on Tuesday announced it has released its file synchronization tool Sync into open alpha. You can download the latest version now for Windows, Mac, and Linux over at labs.bittorrent.com. The company first announced its Sync software back in January, explaining at the time that it uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronize personal files across multiple computers and devices."
Re:Advantages? (Score:5, Informative)
For the non-techies, I assume that coming, out of the box, with the various tricks that bittorrent clients use to Just Work behind nasty little plastic NAT boxes would be the major advantage. Nothing intrinsic to bittorrent as a protocol; but certainly a side effect of bittorrent's history.
It might also be useful if your sharing scenario involves enough people that the efficiencies of bittorrent come into play. If it's just keeping Host A and Host B synchronized, you aren't going to do much better than break even, at best, with rsync. If your plan involves all two dozen members of your club, or your entire extended family and a tedious-but-HD vacation video, bittorrent starts to look better; but with the advantage that this 'key/encryption' stuff allows you to have a single host serving different folders with different access controls, unlike conventional trackers that are usually 'public' or 'private', with granular control, if any, mostly hacked on.
Aside from the ease of use, though, the amount of benefit you'd see over rsync seems likely to be directly related to how wide your distribution is.
Re:Advantages? (Score:4, Informative)
If you have symmetric up/down, then there would be no speed advantage.
Well I suppose it still depends. Imagine you have 20 computers staying in sync, all through symmetric 10mbps connections, then you add another. Even if the additional computer only has a 10Mbps connection, meaning you may not get the download faster than simply downloading from one source, you could still see a benefit from distributing the load among the other 20 computers. So instead of saturating the upload pipe for one computer, you're a minor .5mbps upload on each.