On April 23, we opened up a little Alpha project called BitTorrent Sync. The response from users has been: awesome. Together, they’ve been helping build a better way to sync.
BitTorrent Sync was designed to solve for what we see as real, fundamental challenges to data synchronization: limitations on speed, size, and space; limitations on file security and dependency on cloud infrastructure. Because BitTorrent Sync is based on distributed technology, you can sync as many big files as you want. Transfers are encrypted, and information isn’t stored on any server, or in the cloud. Your content belongs to you, and stays on devices of your choice. That’s the way syncing should work.
Turns out, it’s working for you guys, too. To date, more than a petabyte of anonymous data has been synced between BitTorrent Sync users. A petabyte! To put that into context, the Internet Archive, one of the world wide web’s largest repositories of media, houses 10 petabytes of data. Sync is massive. And it’s growing. Over 70 terabytes of anonymous data are synced daily.
But Sync isn’t just working in ways we imagined. It’s working in creative ways that we never could have predicted. A hacker team at TechCrunch Disrupt built a private distributed blog platform off Sync. Users are sending us on scavenger hunts. We’re inspired. And we’re excited about what’s next for Sync.
If you haven’t yet tried BitTorrent Sync, you can grab the open Alpha here. Happy Syncing, people.
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.
