Creating A New Sync Where Files Are Already Mirrored

[Frosty]

We have 2 hard drives, in different physical locations, connected only by the internet.

 

Both drives have exactly the same data, copied manually, BitTorrent sync has never been used.

 

We want to setup BitTorrent sync so as one of us works from a hard drive, any changes are mirrored to the other.

 

Will BitTorrent sync recognize the files are the same, or will it try to re copy the entire 3TB of data? (Would take over 800 hours over the internet!)

 

Many thanks

[Moe]

Once you have add the folder you are trying to sync - if it's the whole harddrive then it would be the root directory of it - BitTorrent Sync will start indexing all the files and folders.

 

If you have 3 TB worth of data that might take up to 8 hours or more depending on what the resources are available on the server/computer where BitTorrent Sync is runnning on (lot's of CPU power or low CPU power etc).

 

After that only changes will be added to the files. It won't sync the whole file if you change something on it but only the pieces that have changed. So if you add something to a 5GB file it won't sync the 5GBs again but the bits and bytes that have changed within the file.

 

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[chuckhager]

I have the same scenario as Frosty. 

1.) My office computer has an external hard drive with one folder named "data" that has about 400 GB of files on it.  BTsync is installed and running.

2.) I used a program called HD Clone, to create an exact image of this external hard drive on a second external hard drive.

3.) I took this second external hard drive home and connected it to my home computer.

4.) When I setup BTSync on my home computer and installed the key to "sync" with my office "data" drive, it did not recognize that the drive already had identical files with my office computer and started to re-sync all the files again.

 

The operation said it would take 6 months to complete! (Not acceptable for how I plan to use this program.)

 

So the question is;  Can BTsync be setup to skip all files that already exist, (since all the files on the second drive are exactly identical because of the cloning software I used), at the second location?

 

I think they call this "seeding the drive"