ChrisH

That's FUD and you know it. Wow. Good look getting ANY software developing company to again support an operating system that's been EOL'd by the supplier. No, they stopped supporting XP because it's THIRTEEN FREAKING YEARS old. I'll leave the rest of your BS uncommented. Keep using XP and BTSync 1.3 then, nobody's stopping you.

If you are trying to sync live VMs (both source and target) you are bound to fail anyways. No running VM will like it very much if some external program arbitrarily changes blocks (or bytes) on the storage layer. If the target VM is NOT running it should not matter whether you compare bytes or blocks. You still can't rely on the target being consistent as long as data on the source is changed and synced. Hyper-V for instance has an extra copy-on-write mechanism for VM replication to make sure that all changes are synced in the correct order. And even there the target VM has to be shut down while replicating.

So the user just plugs in his trusty portable harddisk / USB key / smartphone and copies all the juicy data onto that. (Also, WTF? An accounting department that can't afford a simple file server?)

The feature you are looking for is called "selective sync" and it is already requested and discussed here: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/29683-selective-sync/

I know (and I appreciate it), but I meant a notice about the Stories thread being removed.

Oops An "official" notice for that would have been nice.

I know I started this, but I think they would like you to post your "success" stories in the story thread they explicitly linked to.

Well, develop something from scratch then. Or invest in SyncThing.

But chances are not bad, because if the BTSync core runs as a service they will have to create some kind of standalone UI anyway. And what would be better suited than the real web UI the Linux version already has? That way they don't have to build some IPC interface from scratch.

Nothing you marked as "essential" can be done with BTSync. I think you should look for some kind of groupware solution. OwnCloud might work, but something like Kolab might be better suited. I prefer MS Exchange myself

I guess that 1.4 updated your configuration files to a new format and 1.3 can't use that. If you don't have a backup (look for .old files, BTSync on Win at least makes a backup on updates) you'll have to wipe the config and recreate all shares manually.

I don't think that will work. The latency involved in BTSync connections makes them virtually unusable for anything time-critical (and TCP packets are). You don't need a fixed IP address for VPNs (most of them will work with DynDNS-like services), and there also are enough VPN solutions that work even when both ends are behind a NAT, carrier-grade or otherwise.

Does "I don't use it because the UI sucks and I cannot run it portable anymore" count? It's a story, alright...

+1. Love the features, hate the UI. If it at least was a real web UI so that the BTSync core could run as a service, I could live with it (and people could use it with whatever browser they like).

You can hover over the tray icon and see the global speed there. No, I don't like it either.

For the record: This seems to be caused by http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/31290-not-possible-to-make-bt-sync-portable-anymore/ - I was running BTSync as a "portable" installation on a Bitlocker drive, which seems no longer to work. I'll try symlinking the directory from %appdata% to the Bitlocker drive or something like that.

Well, from my (admittedly technical) point of view release notes should reflect the actual functionality of the product. I'm not going to split hairs about the difference between "has been dropped" and "does no longer work" with you.

Especially since the known workaround does not work on 1.4 anymore.

At least the btsync:// part seems to be implemented in 1.4. You also can generate https links now and send them to people with or without BTSync installed - still syncs whole folders, not single files though.

Okay, that sucks. Why isn't this mentioned in the release notes ("now we REALLY don't support it anymore")? But it explains the crashes on my home server after updating to 1.4 I guess I'll have to trust BTSync to recognize that just because the Bitlocker drive is not unlocked yet that does not mean it should delete all files from all peers like it did in the past...

There should be a settings.dat.old and a sync.dat.old file which are backups of the 1.3 version config. Just rename them removing the ".old" part and 1.3 should work again.

Yeah, sorry - should have mentioned the OS. It's Windows Server 2012 (not R2). I don't think there are any 1.2 clients, but I'll check. There might be 1.3.pre-109 (or whatever the update with the compatibility issue in the release notes was) clients, though. But I don't think it even has time to connect to any peer. It's literally "double-click - crash".

There is http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/25823-generate-encrypted-read-only-secret-without-api-key but I'm not sure if this still works in 1.4. BTW I was talking about real metal, not vServers (and Windows, not Linux) - but yes, you probably are right about DMA. Still, I trust my hoster enough (and I have never heard about the police using sophisticated stuff like that - usually they just grab the hardware and take it to their overworked tech labs).

I updated my home server to BTSync 1.4 and the app just crashes on startup. I clicked "submit a dump to developers" but then it just crashes again. Thankfully I could recover the config files from their .old versions and use the old 1.3.109 exe again. Any ideas what to do? I really don't want to wipe the config and recreate all 40 shared folders and their keys and their options (named hosts etc.) by hand... On my laptop (with only two shared folders) the update went fine, btw.

Nobody stops you from renting a root server and putting your own encryption layer on it - that's what I do. My hosting provider would need some very sophisticated procedures (like deep-freezing the RAM modules so the key stays readable when they pull them out) - I don't think that's realistic. It's much easier to e.g. break into my house and plug some spying device into the LAN. Also, BTSync offers encrypted read only secrets so that hosts store the data only encrypted.