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BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

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Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#81

Post by da_n »

johne20 wrote: post #64
acabal wrote: post #33

I looked at BTSync the other day when researching self-hosted Dropbox alternatives. It looks like a great product and so far beats the pants off the closest competitor, Seafile, for ease of install and use. I was really impressed. But unfortunately it's not open source, so it comes down to an issue of trust--which, in the end, is the same issue with Dropbox and really the entire point of moving to self-hosted for me.…

Did you ever evaluate http://owncloud.org/ ? I have never used it, but looked at briefly awhile back and it is open source.

From almost everyone I've heard that's tried it it's unfortunately extremely buggy.

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#82

Post by res0nat0r »

krasin wrote: post #23
keiferski wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. A service with the word "torrent" in it will never be adopted by a corporate entity. (edit: "typical" corporation. Technology companies don't count) 2. You may be overestimating how much the average person cares about file storage size, 3rd party servers, or transferring large files.

Amazon S3 allows to download files over BitTorrent: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/S3Torrent.htm... Ubuntu is also available via official torrent releases: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads A few cloud companies use torrent to distribute images across servers (not really a proof, bu anyway: http://www.jcmartin.org/posts/large-scale-file-distribution-... ) Aren't Amazon, Canonical, a…

Think corporate where the boardroom consists of people in expensive suits, not boardrooms with people in expensive jeans and sneakers.

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#83

Post by ekianjo »

da_n wrote: post #81
johne20 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever evaluate http://owncloud.org/ ? I have never used it, but looked at briefly awhile back and it is open source.

From almost everyone I've heard that's tried it it's unfortunately extremely buggy.

Same here, did not hear very good things about it.

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#85

Post by hemancuso »

pdx wrote: post #42
hemancuso wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can mount dropbox and a whole bunch of other cloud services as a filesystem using ExpanDrive - google drive and box support coming next www.expandrive.com (I am the author)

I use a competitor of yours called WebDrive. Can you discuss how you may be better then they are? I am actually a bit unhappy with them, as I occasionally have strange behavior where a file refuses to upload, or the cache sometimes quits updating. However, my version is a few years old, so perhaps they fixed these issues. I have thought of buying their new version, but I am open to hearing why I should switch.

I think it is an all around better product. No need to tweak settings to make it work. It's generally faster, licenses are cross platform, we support more protocols. It's less expensive. We care :)

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#86

Post by bigiain »

tlrobinson wrote: post #76
petsos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to trust BoxCryptor you can as well trust BTSync directly.

You could argue that trusting two different entities for encryption and storage is safer than trusting a single entity for both. Two unrelated parties are "unlikely to collude" against you. Of course I'd rather not have to trust either, especially with encryption. Is there an open source equivalent to BoxCryptor?

BoxCryptor interacts just fine with EncFS on Linux (I don't know if its a reimplementation or just a nice Mac OS X gui wrapper round the EncFS code), and EncFS is GPL.

Note that EncFS "leaks" quite a bit of metadata - you might have problems explaining yourself if you've got files called blockbuster-movie.mpg or kiddie-porn.jpg - in certain configurations those filenames will be exposed (I think BoxCryptor always exposes filenames/directory-structure in the free version).

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#87

Post by johne20 »

da_n wrote: post #81
johne20 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever evaluate http://owncloud.org/ ? I have never used it, but looked at briefly awhile back and it is open source.

From almost everyone I've heard that's tried it it's unfortunately extremely buggy.

Good to know, thx.

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#88

Post by solnyshok »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #36

It has a massive problem which Dropbox solves: the need for both computers to be on at the same time. I have a laptop. I have a desktop. They are almost never on at the same time. With Dropbox this is _fine_ - the files go from one to the cloud, and then to the other when it's turned on. With BTSync, this would mean that my files would never sync.

theoretically, that could be solved by plugin to aerofs or btsync that would use freely available cloud storage at dropbox/skydrive/gdrive/etc to store diffs between you laptop and desktop during your commute or weekend. now, we need such plugin written.

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#89

Post by solnyshok »

monkeynotes wrote: post #72
AndrewDucker wrote: post #36

It has a massive problem which Dropbox solves: the need for both computers to be on at the same time. I have a laptop. I have a desktop. They are almost never on at the same time. With Dropbox this is _fine_ - the files go from one to the cloud, and then to the other when it's turned on. With BTSync, this would mean that my files would never sync.

Also Dropbox offers offsite secure backup. If I loose all my machines I can at least rely on Dropbox retaining my data.

true, but it is very unlikely event, to loose all of them at the same time, esp if n>2 and they aren't at the same location (e.g. 1 office, 1 home, 1 in transit)

Re: BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

#90

Post by urza »

bigiain wrote: post #68
acabal wrote: post #33

I looked at BTSync the other day when researching self-hosted Dropbox alternatives. It looks like a great product and so far beats the pants off the closest competitor, Seafile, for ease of install and use. I was really impressed. But unfortunately it's not open source, so it comes down to an issue of trust--which, in the end, is the same issue with Dropbox and really the entire point of moving to self-hosted for me.…

"Do you trust BitTorrent to properly encrypt your data as they promise? To not send it to someone else on the sly?" I've currently got BTSync dealing with a bunch of "non-private" data, and EncFS (and BoxCryptor on OS X) encrypting the more private data I'm syncing with BTSync. I'm still "trusting" the BTSync app not to mess with my machine(s) in unexpected ways - but I have to trust every application I run to do tha…

I'm confident enough that's secured against pretty much everything up to federal law enforcement or nation state level snooping.

Could you please elaborate what you mean by that? As far as I know, it is not possible to "crack" EncFS or Truecrypt as long as you use reasonably strong password and are able to protect it. Or am I wrong?

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