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BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

torrentfreak.com

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Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#71

Post by webwanderings »

buro9 wrote: post #9

Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing. One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where…

I pretty much agree. Correct me if I'm wrong but Dropbox were the first to have come up with Camera Upload feature, which basically makes any average user go trouble free with their cellphones, tablets, snapping away photographs knowing that they will be ready on their desktop to view if they want to.

Google+ does that too now, but this is in fact a killer feature which has been adopted well by the average folks out there. So yes, Dropbox is not just about file sharing anymore.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#72

Post by mseebach »

zepolen wrote: post #67
mseebach wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox has your stuff stored away in a fairly secure facility, while BitTorrent Sync just syncs between machines you've installed it on. That's worth something. Of course, you can just rent a cheap VPS somewhere and have it sync your BTS folders, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find a VPS with 100 GB storage for less than $10/month.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

The biggest HDD that page offers is 80 GB at €20 = $26/month.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#73

Post by scott_karana »

zepolen wrote: post #67
mseebach wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox has your stuff stored away in a fairly secure facility, while BitTorrent Sync just syncs between machines you've installed it on. That's worth something. Of course, you can just rent a cheap VPS somewhere and have it sync your BTS folders, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find a VPS with 100 GB storage for less than $10/month.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

80 GB for 20 Euros isn't exactly 100 GB _available_ storage for under $10. :P

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#74

Post by cobookman »

If they allowed us to pick and choose what we want to download from friends shares as well as search our friends shares, this could become an interesting tool.

Imagine a private p2p site that you and your friends use. You choose who to share with and what files you can see.

Then add links to give to friends so attaching files in emails would be a sinch.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#75

Post by lifeguard »

utnick wrote: post #64
lifeguard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.

your 3rd example would not be an ideal use-case If one member of your affinity group gets arrested, the police would have access to all of your files plus all of the IP addresses of everyone in your affinity group

You are mis-characterizing the use case. It is preventing censorship, not securing data.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#77

Post by ROFISH »

namityadav wrote: post #5

We're looking at AeroFS and BitTorrent Sync for sharing sensitive files with our team members. We're leaning towards BS mainly because this feels completely P2P, whereas AeroFS may become useless if the company shuts down. Is that right? I'd love to hear from someone who has used both of these about stability, sync conflicts, CPU load etc. Also would love to hear about plans to open source BS.

I'm looking for something like this too. My big concerns of a Dropbox alternative is:

* Ability to handle large files (300MB incompressible Photoshop) and able to handle large complete data stores. (1 TB, which is impossible with Dropbox)

* Selectability for certain folders on certain users (no need for all data to be on all machines)

* The ability to 'archive' files to only the host.

* Good LAN networking with host so that the portable machines (iPads, Retina Macbook Pros with puny 128GB HDD) can use it fine.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#79

Post by illicium »

weej wrote: post #40

This is great; however, folks can still securely store data on cloud services. They just need to take a Trust No one (TNO) approach and encrypt their data to disk. For example you can use TrueCrypt and create/mount a drive volume that is fully encrypted while synced across a file share storage/sync service like DropBox. The only downside is that you have to install the TrueCrypt application on your client device, whi…

Another downside of using Truecrypt is that when you make a change in your volume, the whole volume file gets reuploaded to your storage/sync service.

A better solution is to use .sparsebundles (Mac only) or something like BoxCryptor/encfs that encrypts files in the volume individually

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#80

Post by jmillikin »

manishsharan wrote: post #20
buro9 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right... the bittorrent speciality. I guess the marketing is to provide them with a nice level of deniability. It's not a Dropbox competitor, it's just encrypted folder sharing.

I would respectfully disagree with what you seem to be implying. This service would mostly be used by us who are wary about trusting Google/Microsoft/Dropbox and the judgement of their automated decision systems with our life . Yesterday there was a HN story about a guy who got kicked off Google Docs because an automated program was trolling/mining through their users files and its judgement was not to be questioned…

  > Yesterday there was a HN story about a guy who got
  > kicked off Google Docs because an automated program was
  > trolling/mining through their users files and its
  > judgement was not to be questioned by mere mortals.
Wasn't that the user who was using a Docs form/spreadsheet to collect passwords from his customers? Google has stated that such forms are reviewed manually after being reported (for example, http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/7pKj6aXBK...), which means there must have been at least two humans involved.

IMO the risk with cloud storage isn't in getting suspended by some daemon run amok, it's in data being too easy to leak. Files stored in Google Drive or Dropbox are just one accidental "share" click away from becoming public.

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