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BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

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Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#163
And the wheel turns:

http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...

The wheel of reincarnation I'm referring to in this case is the cycling between a mainframe/thin-client architecture and a PC-based distributed architecture.

In ye olde days it was mainframes and dumb terminals. Then it was PCs and LANs/the Internet. Then it was web browsers and tablets (dumb terminal 2.0) and The Cloud (mainframe 2.0). Now the wheel is turning once again...

The cloud is great as long as I don't care who owns my data, want to pay constantly for hosting it (or put up with arbitrary and changeable limits), have no privacy, lose my data when a startup goes out of business, etc.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#164
post #87

I was in the alpha for this, but didn't use it. The single reason was that they had no solution for "two files modified while offline" at the time. This is just far too likely for me to remain an unaddressed issue. I don't know if it's been improved since then.

A solution could be to give each of your machines their own folder. In this folder they are the source and the only machine allowed to make changes. Other machines can read, but not update.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox's core offering boils down to file sync + cloud sync. There's many use cases where that's what you want - access on whatever devices you have the app installed on, and also over the web. Cloud sync leads to storage limits (which don't make sense as a consumer for file sync, but are necessary for large scale cloud sync) and centralisation (desirable for vast access, not so much for some situations). BT sync is…

Is there anyone interested in cloud sync for its own sake? In other words, if the entire thing works seamlessly and identically in-house, and assuming a disciplined backup strategy, is there anybody going "But if it were in someone else's data center, that'd be so much better!" BT sync sounds like a complete replacement for dropbox for people with the skills and willingness to set it up.

It's a fair point, but if we consider the GP's claims, they're pretty much all benefits of cloud sync. You get a web-based view for your albums, you can share easier outside of your own devices, you can - as he says, compete with the top services for photo, video and music sharing. Cloud sync makes you a media company.

Personally, I use cloud sync for a lot of backup stuff. Granted, it's mostly Git to BitBucket, but in school I used to push documents to Dropbox or Box just to have a backup. I wasn't interested in having my essays synced to my phone, just that if my other versions died I could download my work again to another device.

If you're referring to companies though, no I doubt they'd want a seamless and perfect system in somebody else's data center. That said, a data center and a perfect seamless cloud backup solution is a considerable cost, especially for a startup.

But yep, I agree, BT sync would be perfect if you didn't want/need Dropbox remote backups or web services.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#168
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can auto-sync high-res photos in Google+, too, but it ounts in the 5 GB free storage you have.

Images that are 2048x2048 and below don't consume space on Google drive.

I know. I meant the "higher-res" ones do.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox's core offering boils down to file sync + cloud sync. There's many use cases where that's what you want - access on whatever devices you have the app installed on, and also over the web. Cloud sync leads to storage limits (which don't make sense as a consumer for file sync, but are necessary for large scale cloud sync) and centralisation (desirable for vast access, not so much for some situations). BT sync is…

Is there anyone interested in cloud sync for its own sake? In other words, if the entire thing works seamlessly and identically in-house, and assuming a disciplined backup strategy, is there anybody going "But if it were in someone else's data center, that'd be so much better!" BT sync sounds like a complete replacement for dropbox for people with the skills and willingness to set it up.

Pushing this, for a hacker setting up a VPS is a matter of minutes... BAM cloud-sync! ;)

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#170
post #31

Looking at some of the examples, I'm starting to see a future where people trade entirely in hashes - send some amount of bitcoins to address X, receive access to read-only access to bittorrent folder Y which is automatically populated with the latest TV episodes for a series, etc. Any idea how to apply that sort of anonymity and convenience to the real world though? Scanning QR codes with a phone seems to be the bes…

No one's using QR codes. See: http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/
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