The Types of Things People are Using SYNC for

[AintNoSin]

I have BTSync on my main computer and on my laptop, with an empty Lightroom catalog in my shared folder. When I'm on the road, I import my photos into Lightroom. Assuming I have WiFi available, I'll just leave my computer running overnight, and by morning, my edited photos are mirrored at home. Then, when I'm back, I'll just import the catalog in BT Sync into my main catalog.

This eliminates my old process, which is to export a catalog onto an external drive, then import it off the drive onto my main machine. It also saves my from having to give money to some cloud service to do the same thing for me.

[Shot2]

Using it to backup 500+ GB of local data from my local Windows PC to a distant server (with btsync as a service under Ubuntu). No issue so far, works great and snappy

[highlander411]

Simple sync Pictures folder between an external on my laptop to an mapped NAS on my desktop.

I have my Eye-Fi card for my DSLR camera save to my laptop and it syncs to my home NAS with AppSync.

[timothevs]

Keeping three machines in sync. Two iMacs (work/home) and one mac pro (home server). Syncing common installer files, comics, etc. Most rigorous use is keeping iPhoto library in sync with three machines as well as the iTunes library. Working very well so far.

[oneseventeen]

I've installed it on 3 family members' computers so we can have a "photo album" folder and share family photos more easily. Training family on not deleting files, and not just throwing every picture they take in there took a while, but I think they got it.

I'm also a sysadmin paying for dropbox for business, and when this is fully tested and I can sort out a good backup method I'll switch to this in a heartbeat. I mainly just need a good gui for conflicting versions and the ability to sync only file changes (it may do this already, not sure... but our design team uses dropbox for large photoshop files). File versioning and "undelete" features will also help a ton, as I'm nervous for staff to have the ability to delete files others rely on by deleting local files.

[Varnagas]

At my work I were looking tool to replace Skype file transferring. It was reasonably good tool but it was not working at its full potential for my standards. So I looked for sync option what allows unlimited local speed and good international connectivity. Tools like dropbox does not fit, since our internet connection it quite limited speed, takes too long to upload to servers and just after that sync locally with nearby machines. And so I found BTsync.

Unlimited file size, unlimited speeds, interconnecting international syncs. Could not have wished something better for the job. Saves lots of time compared to Skype.

Also use it at home for personal syncs, among PSs and android.

[jfreiman]

I am using the BitTorrent Sync service for a couple uses

1. My Mother who is 2000 miles away and I are scanning in boxes and boxes of family photos and slides. Together we are using Sync to keep each others folders up to date - both for the photos and all the metadata we keep updating with gps location tags and people tags.

2. I am also using Sync to keep my Media Center television recordings in sync between my apartment by work and my home.

record once, delete once - sweet!

[trangtrau]

sync game among cyber game

[jeroenboon]

We are currently looking into the possibilities of using BitSync for your study association. We have an active base of volunteers of around 100 students, and everyone has their own laptop. Currently we are only providing access to committee specific folders on our own workstations, or via samba when using VPN.

We are trying to work something out where we can give each committee their own key and sync their folders between our server and their laptops.

One of the main problems we are facing currently is the lack of user-management, we want to be able to revoke individual users' rights to sync with the specific folders. Our main workaround would be to duplicate the folder, generate a new key, empty the old one and issue the new secret to everyone except the member leaving the committee. But this is not really workable.

If we can make a set up which is user-friendly enough for non-geeks to use, and maintain than we would be looking at syncing ~1tb of data over 100+ users.

[BryantI]

So I have this loaded on my WHS 2011 and each laptop now syncs there photos back to the server and then I sync all the music, video, full set of Photos back to my Laptop as I have a second 1TB drive in the place of the DVD drive so I have all my videos/music when traveling and as a second back up. On top of this I am in the process of haveing it loaded on the works server so that we can sync the folders need when out of the office and around the world to my Sales Team as we have be running on DropBox but due to some only have the starter account this is limited and group what all the files on there server. This is great I have the Android app running and this works as well just seems to be heavy on the battery so OK on my tablet but have turned it off on the phone and only turn it on when I want to update the few files that I do want on my phone. My wish is to have a server version that would allow you to set up a different username and password that I could access localy through http and the ip address as this would make managing the server side easier. Keep up the good work this is the best free software I have used for years.

[nevermindrs]

using for sync pictures/music between pc and tablet/android devices (as readonly), for now pc is mandatory. Later i'll use sync between mobile pictures to pc, as backup.

[Tel]

I have a customer that has a central server and field engineers. I have been looking for a better solution than the VPN they currently use.

BTS works for us by having a 'remote' folder on their server and a 'shared' folder on the engineers laptops. All records, manuals updates etc that one engineer now gets can be easily replicated to other engineers, where as before any new information was manually downloaded when it was requested.

Whilst I totally get the comments about it being free, I will be seeking a way of sending some beer tockens your way in the future. It's well worth it.

[buchno]

I share a collection of several thousand osu! beatmaps with a group of my friends. We initially used Dropbox, but had to switch to AeroFS when it exceeded 2 GB, and later to BTS when AeroFS went commercial.

It's pretty handy, since the osu! website only allows a couple of downloads per hour.

I'm also thinking of setting it up on my pie, in order to ditch Dropbox entirely.

[gdazer]

I use BTSYNC within a total Linux environment, and I look forward to when it becomes available for Android. Primarily, I am looking for solutions away from Google, and other cloud oriented environments. So Linux apps like Zim, TomBoy, RedNotebook can be used easily enough as drop-in replacements for Google Tasks and Google Calendar. Their flat-file structures makes it easy to manage, and knowing that the connections across all devices is encrypted is a bonus.

As an aside, I understand that there is some development work going on with BitMessage, which could be ( and I say that liberally) a future replacement for email. BitMessage is based on the same communications protocol used in the BitCoin world, so that could be something to keep an eye on.

We have so much thanks to give to Edward Snowden, for helping to open our eyes to all the surveillance nonsense that's been going on behind our backs. Kudos to him I reckon!

[Camaban]

I use BTSYNC within a total Linux environment, and I look forward to when it becomes available for Android.

It is available for Android.

[elavnave]

I have a band (more like a studio project) that is only two people. After living fairly close for six years, we now live about 90 minutes apart. We've been using sync to seamlessly continue working on songs by having a read/write share folder of all of our Audacity sessions and WAV files. We've been using sync since it was first publically offered and will tell everyone and anyone who will listen.

[gl00mer]

first of all: good work and thumbs up to everyone working on the bittorrent sync project!! keep going!!

My friends and me share a lot of hobbys. From several sport activitys to partys (wide range ;-) ) and of course digicams or smartphone are always companions.

after breaking the 2gb barrier at dropbox for sharing all the photos and videos, we switched to btsync and are so happy of not being dependent on dropbox anymore. unfortunately we're not following the "bigger is better" slogan from the mainpage, because most of all we share photos (about 99% of our share). which doesn't mean that it's not working. quite the contrary - it works fine!! but i think not as performant as it does with large files.

nevertheless, i'm very glad, that the times of "hey, i've uploaded a .zip-file to a one-click-hoster. follow the link and extract the file to get the photos" are gone

thanks for all your work and time you spend on this project!!

greetings from germany

gl00mer

[radek]

hi, how do you setup the "zombie" computers of family members? I am planning to do the same, but would like neither SW of that comp. to scan such folders, nor family members to accidentally get on files content. [e.g. surprise photo books ]

I also set up more read-only relay servers daily, as I find suitable "zombie" computers of family-members and friends that are IT-illeterate enough not to care/understand what's going on, and use practically no disk space on their massively over-sized hard-drives and have high-speed internet connections as well, so that they won't mind further relying my files.

[DaxtonD]

For me, Bittorrent Sync as solved all of my problems.

About 2 years ago, I purchased a NAS. I store everything there.

In fact, the 3 PC's in our house don't store any data locally. I've mapped the network drives on all the PC's and this has eliminated the need for any sync software on any of the PC's.

The largest problem has always been accessing the data from mobile devices. Actually, to be clear, there have been a lot of ways that I could access the data, but there has never been a good sync option from mobile. I could connect via WebDav or FTP, but Android downloads the file locally for editing. I'd then have to manually re-upload the file back to the NAS.

Shockingly, NAS manufacturers haven't gotten an out-of-the-box sync solution.

A huge reason for buying a NAS was to eliminate my dependency on cloud storage services.

I've installed the Bittorrent sync server on my NAS. The install was extremely easy.

Again, since i access all of the data on the server via mapped drives, I don't need to install BitTorrent Sync on the PC's in the house.

On my Android phones and tablets, I've chosen to sync my DCIM picture folders to a common folder on the NAS.

Whenever I take a picture on any mobile device, the picture is automatically sent to my NAS, and also synced to all of my Android devices. Pretty sweet! If my wife takes a picture on her phone, it comes directly to my phone. It's instant photo sharing for the family. It's then extremely easy to access the pictures on our PC's.

I've also chosen to backup some folders from our mobile devices. Titanium Backup, Whatsapp messages, Ringtones. ect. As such, I always have an up-to-date backup of important information on my server.

Lastly, I'm syncing my Documents across all of my mobile devices. I now have local access to any of my documents and editing / saving changes are automatically synced across all devices.

I've been able to completely eliminate Dropbox now and maintain complete control of my data.

Thanks Bittorrent!

In my opinion, BTSync is a complete Dropbox killer already. For those of you wishing for API, Streaming, better UI, just wait. It will evolve into something completely extraordinary.

[arashster]

I've been using btsync to synchronize a web server. One is master and the rest are slaves, with read-only keys, downloading changes from the master. Works beautifully.

I can also see companies selling btsync storage instances to compete with Dropbox once the API is ready. Although storage costs are expensive on the cloud.

[c.murphy360]

I too sync the DCIM folder on both my wifes and my Android phone. My wife routinely fills her phone's storage with pictures and videos. I wrote a small script (on my home server) that automatically moves files older than six months out of the synced folder into my master pictures folder. Never have to worry about overloading a phone again, and when I upgrade devices it should be a snap to put the pictures back on her phone, she'll never miss a beat!

Also I have two folders, Movies and TV Shows, each about 5TB which I sync to various comps around the world. Some are full-authority some are one-way. The only issue with the set up is the initial sync, which goes much smoother over a local LAN. Hopefully once I have enough clients running it won't be as taxing to my internet connection to add a new client.

I am interested in the concept of setting up zombies on friends and families computers. It could act as a sort of payment for the tech-support I provide whenever I go home.

For me, Bittorrent Sync as solved all of my problems.

I've installed the Bittorrent sync server on my NAS. The install was extremely easy.

Again, since i access all of the data on the server via mapped drives, I don't need to install BitTorrent Sync on the PC's in the house.

On my Android phones and tablets, I've chosen to sync my DCIM picture folders to a common folder on the NAS.

Whenever I take a picture on any mobile device, the picture is automatically sent to my NAS, and also synced to all of my Android devices. Pretty sweet! If my wife takes a picture on her phone, it comes directly to my phone. It's instant photo sharing for the family. It's then extremely easy to access the pictures on our PC's.

[Guest theron]

I'm using Sync to do replication of Gluster storage clusters using Sync instead of the native Geo Replication available in Gluster. blog post here: http://conrey.org/2013/05/21/bittorrent-sync-as-geo-replication-for-storage/

[broken.pipe]

I'm running the software on my raspberry pi at home (200 km away) which runs 24/7.

Every folder (documents, configs, dotfiles, ...) or collections and libraries (movies, music, pictures, ... ) that i need to backup are now added to the shares list. At home my parent's computers are also linked to bittorrent sync for backing up pictures or sharing them with me.

On my phone, the Android app syncs the entire SD card to my work stations. After taking a picture or GPS track, the data is directly synced to all computers (no more data cables ).

The next step is encouraging more friends to use bittorrent sync and establish some more shares

I used to use Dropbox but it limited me in several ways also the lack of encryption, no rw control and the data transfer over 3rd party servers made me to change to bittorrent sync. Thank you guys!!

[dfennelly]

Hi daxtonD

I have a Lacie Network D2 NAS which I would love to add BT sync to.

How did you go about loading BTsync to your NAS storage device?

thanks

Declan

[JeromySteves]

We're using this to keep 17 remote file servers in sync with our master server.

Prior to using BT Sync it was very difficult. We tried many solutions but never found one that was a good fit. Nothing seems to keep everything truly in sync.

We began using BT Sync about 3 weeks ago and it's been perfect.

The Master server contains around 1.5tb of data over aprox 150 rar files. There are also several directories with 15gb+ of loose files. These directories receive frequent updates to single files.

We have setup 1 way sync from the master to all slaves.

Anytime we make updates on the master all changes are quickly sent out to all slaves.

This system has greatly increased our ability to distribute files over our entire network.

I honestly cannot say enough good things about BT Sync.