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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

#271

Post by nessus42 »

neolefty wrote: post #235
nessus42 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the reasons that you've specified and others, I rolled my own very simple sync system based on Git. The biggest problem I personally have with Dropbbox et. al, is that none of the commercial solutions sync symbolic links opaquely . ("Opaque" syncing of symlinks means to sync the links themselves and not what the symlinks link to.) I use symlinks heavily and so I absolutely require this feature. Most of the commer…

Sounds like it's time for a "design pattern" or "best practice" -- that is, covering up for a tool's faults. What if you treat DropBox as a raw, strict hierarchical store and never use it directly, but only link into it from elsewhere? Move all the links outside of it. ln ~/Dropbox/photos ~/Photos ln ~/Dropbox/family/baby/cute-movies ~/Photos/baby-cute-movies etc.

(1) You just put a symlink into your Dropbox folder with the above sequence of commands, which just serves to illustrate the danger of this approach.

(2) Your suggestion is extremely difficult or impossible to do in the general case.

(3) I have better things to do with my life than rearrange my entire filesystem to suit the ill-conceived whims of a product that does the wrong thing.

(4) I would like to sync parts of my filesystem as they currently are.

(5) I have my own syncing solution that works better for my needs, and it only took me a couple of hours to throw together.

(6) I'm going to use BitTorrent Sync in the future for most of my syncing needs (as long as it turns out to be reliable) since it does syncing properly in the face of symlinks.

(7) I'll still use Dropbox for simple sharing of files with friends and getting files onto my iPad. Apparently, Dropbox just doesn't care about the needs of more sophisticated users, as that isn't a very large market.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#272

Post by Wurlitzer »

X-Istence wrote: post #30

Wish the source was made available, I have an OpenIndiana server with several 1 TB drives running ZFS and I would love to use something like this... but only binaries are available.

That's one of the reasons I switched to ZFS on Linux (http://zfsonlinux.org). It has been stable for over a year now.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#273

Post by omni »

lelandbatey wrote: post #99
uses wrote: post #24

I've been using BitTorrent Sync for the past week. For the use case of sharing large files, it obliterates Dropbox, AeroFS, and Cubby. It distributes the files intelligently and makes optimal use of everyone's bandwidth. Dropbox, for example, slowly uploads all files to the cloud before distributing them, plus there's the space issue. AeroFS allows unlimited space, but is far slower than my Internet and LAN speeds al…

Well, that description totally sold me on BS. That's like everything I want.

Ouch, what an unfortunate acronym. Hopefully people will start using BTS instead.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#274

Post by gph »

zurn wrote: post #241
gph wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? How is the government going to shut down what is basically a private decentralized p2p network? There isn't any central server they can take out and the traffic over the network would look like any other encrypted traffic. If they gained access to the sync group with full permissions they could destroy it and get IP addresses, etc. And the format itself might not lend itself to all the needs of a political activ…

> Why? How is the government going to shut down what is basically a private decentralized p2p network? There isn't any central server they can take out and the traffic over the network would look like any other encrypted traffic. Many ISPs, schools, cafes and corporate networks do this today already. They only allow HTTP (which goes through monitoring) and HTTPS which is decrypted by a MITM proxy (you have to allow t…

True, but adding cute cats to the mix isn't going to fix that either.

I wasn't trying to argue that it was technically infeasible for an Orwellian government to stop it, just that it would be near impossible to stop where this type of traffic isn't already blocked.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#275

Post by burrows »

tunesmith wrote: post #188
api wrote: post #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.…

Isn't the ideal kinda both/neither? Get a "dumb" laptop with plenty of horsepower/space, sign in to something and sync everything over (chef/puppet/btsync/dropbox), do a bunch of work locally, then wipe the laptop. I'd love to have my whole laptop identity work that way. It's sort of possible now but it takes forever to convert all your data and apps over to that approach.

You might like http://projectmeadow.com

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#277

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

bad_user wrote: post #249
Blahah wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No human is looking inside. Files are simply security scanned and assigned a probability of breaking the TOS.

> No human is looking inside Where's the relevance? I asked why is Google , the entity, looking inside of private files? > a probability of breaking the TOS And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS? Also, locking somebody out of their account because of a probability generated by a script, without manual confirmation by a human? OMG. Some people can lose their jobs or…

> And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS?

They probably don't want to allow the services to be used to aid illegal activity. Say what you want about how technology should be completely agnostic to matters of culture and legality, but that isn't at all the case.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#278

Post by AndrewDucker »

pessimizer wrote: post #145
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #59

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.

I don't have both my laptop and desktop on at the same time most of the time. Therefore syncing between them would happen very intermittently if there wasn't a cloud in the middle.

Additionally, I wouldn't be able to get access to my files when I was at my parents without my laptop - which I can do with Dropbox.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#279

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

ptman wrote: post #222
mikemoka wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-Actually Dropbox lets everyone do just that, I can access the shared folder via the dropbox website whenever I want, download files in there and even access the old or deleted versions..something I see very unlikely in this case for now

Dropbox has servers running all the time.

What they're saying is that this is an important advantage that BT Sync lacks.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#280

Post by afterburner »

buro9 wrote: post #220
afterburner wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

224 photos? I need a solution for on the order of 40,000... for which Flickr is perfect, since there is no storage limit, just a very small flat fee.

Nope, that's just one directory. I was just illustrating the one photo sharing piece... which is as simple as drag a folder into Dropbox, and go to the web interface and click share. I have approx' 40k photos (not including the .raw files) over about 180GB (including the .raw files).

OK, so that's costing you $200 a year, instead of $25 on Flickr.
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