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."

How can they possibly know that number?

[goruka]

I guess that's why it was closed-source only?

Re:

[vux984]

Even at worst that's not less secure. Troll fail.

Re:How can they possibly know that number?

[masternerdguy]

You can hide rootkits in your source code by setting their text color to white.

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[GigaBurglar]

I almost replied to this. Oh wait..

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[femtobyte]

Ha! That's why I always edit code on a black background! Unfortunately, some nefarious miscreants seem to have deleted every line of code before I can download it; all I see is a blank screen whenever I go to edit.

Re:

[GuB-42]

Beware of rootkits written in whitespace [wikipedia.org].

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.

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[Kjella]

Standard tracker functionality? Yes, you could probably use DHT or similar but old fashioned trackers are simple, reliable and doesn't really give away anything but volume of data transferred.

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[vux984]

So, what are the open source alternatives here for comparison? (doesn't specifically need to be bittorrent) but a good open source multi-platform (win/mac/linux/bsd) sync tool.

I'm genuinely interested in what others are using/recommending in this area.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Owncloud is more along the traditional dropbox/cloud storage setup.

It does require a server system that is accessible for your systems to sync to.

I'm not sure that there is really anything else in the multi-host peer to peer data sync category yet.

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[Anonymous Coward]

tahoe-lafs is an opensource, multi-platform, redundant, distributed file system. It looks like it has more features than bittorrent sync, but uploads might be slower.

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[chrnb]

Tahoe-Lafs seems to have great potential, reminds me of the OG Wuala, it's a nightmare to get setup at the moment though.

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[Burz]

I2P http://geti2p.net/ [geti2p.net]

It lets you do torrents and iMule (and most other things), securely and anonymously.

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] "

Re:

[gshegosh]

It's said in the linked forum thread that collected statistics are anonimized, but there's clearly an ID (id=htRWdGwwER-daEraerE) in the URL called. How is that anonimized, is beyond me.

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[black3d]

Share all of your anonymous statistics collected by Sync with /b/ and see if they can figure out who you are. Or better yet, Reddit. A string identifying your client is simply to weed out duplicate or fake data, not to tie your sync information to YOU.

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[Bengie]

Anonymous data can still be uniquely identified. It is anonymous so long as you can't identify the original person. At work we "anonymize" user data all the time by removing their names/etc and replacing their non-anonymous identifiers with anonymous identifiers.

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[gshegosh]

Sooo, what's the great fuss about cookies then? All they contain is some kind of ID, too -- right?

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[dragisha]

They are also CPU hogging. I shared few folders just for fun of it, and set automatic start on reboot and everything. Few days later, my laptops are idle for hours, and they are still guzzling power. Fast check, it's btsync, and I presumed idle means no CPU usage, at least no 35%.

So I killed all four instances I set up for my test. For my needs, one closed source (d***box) solution is more than enough. At least it is not grabbing CPU when presumably idle. What I really need to do, most probably, is to spend

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! If you setup software designed to do its job in the background or when the system is idle - it actually uses cpu and draws power when in operation? How ridiculous, my laptop doesn't draw any power when idle, after a while it starts putting power back into the grid because I use a closed source (d***box) solution.

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[Anonymous Coward]

/me slaps Anonymous Coward with a rainbow trout

Take that!

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[Random Data]

the mars rover is tracking and recording our brainwaves also

That would explain this [news.com.au]

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[fcmeneg]

The Ubuntu £inux parasite is in full force. I have returned to tell you once again about the dangers of the Ubuntu £inux conspiracy. Ubuntu is taking over the world using BitTorrent to infect hard drives with abnormal software configurations. It is a virus spreading over the net and nobody, not even Microsoft can stop them. The knights at Microsoft are entering emergency preparation for a last plan to save users from the Ubuntu virus, but it is unlikely such a small company can compete against the Ubuntu Tycoons. Ubuntu is an invasion of privacy: It keeps work from getting done by handicapping users with LibreOffice, and it relays all data that passes through it to the NSA and Amazon.com . Will the forces of good prevail? Probably not. We should prepare for the armageddon of computing.

That's FUD. Ubuntu is a very good OS, at least more secure than Windows.

Re:

[Ignacio]

The fact that you in turn save encrypted copies of their data.

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.

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[complete loony]

FYI, they're transferring file blocks based on their hash. They aren't doing delta comparisons as this would require you to cache the previous version of the file. So if you insert a byte at the start of your file, expect the whole thing to be re-transferred.

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[Bengie]

Transferring "blocks" based on hashes, not files. You don't need to re-transfer the entire file, just the entire block. You know, just like how BitTorrent works.

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[UnsignedInt32]

Actually, the case that was illustrated in the earlier comment can throw things off pretty bad. By inserting a bit at the beginning of the file, it'll pretty much shift the offset of the block for the whole file thereafter invalidating all the blocks, unless the actual data of files are considered. (Which I believe BitTorrent Sync is NOT doing.)

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[Burz]

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.

I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like Sync may accomplish the very significant task of getting users to easily share and manage (and use) keys like it was just something you do while working with your files.

That would be far more significant than merely attaching a distributed filesystem to a P2P protocol.

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[UnsignedInt32]

That's the one thing that I love about it.

It reduces onboarding process for the user as simple as typing in the secret. One of the pet peeves I had with most of P2P file synchronization services were that they required registration with the central server. It's much easier directing my peer installing software, then typing in secret instead of "install the software, now go to their website and register, wait for E-mail confirmation, and then confirm your E-mail...what? You can't remember the password you ha

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.

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[Fluffeh]

Indeed, I thought this was going to be the perfect thing for say two friends to use as a backup method between each other - not so much a randon anyone on the internets has the backup... If it does pick users off the internet, I am less interested in it - I thought the concept of peer to peer based backup (but selecting your peers) was brilliant.

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[HJED]

I think you may have misunderstood (that figure is total data transferred by all their users), Aerofs [aerofs.com] is a really good p2p sync tool that you might want to look at for what you want though.

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[Xylantiel]

From reading the descriptions on the sync site... no. Anyone with the key can access the files. This provides some security, but it is pretty brittle. As long as everyone using it understands the level of security that should be applied to that key. i.e. anyone who steals the key can access the files. So, for example, never send the key over email.

This seems like a reasonable solution for either just syncing personal files, where one individual has control of the key(s). Or syncing among a small tec

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[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.

Killed my Mac

[jsdcnet]

I have no idea how this is even possible, but BT Sync kills my home Mac's network connection. It's so weird. I can ping out from my mac fine, but pinging TO the mac results in 90% packet loss. Needless to say, this makes the network quite useless. Quit the app, no more packet loss. Took me quite a while to track that down!