Wishlist (Archive)


aurika

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I would like to see a way of calling an external application once the current changes to the secret share have been completed.

This could have many uses;

a) triggering a backup process to save the current state.

B) Starting an upload process to mirror the share to a more traditional shared store (ftp, webdav etc)

c) Sending an email to notify that files have been updated

d) Posting new pictures received from a phone to Facebook.

e) ...

There would need to be an option to 'freeze' the share while the application is running so it wouldn't have to deal with the files changing unexpectedly.

Hmmm; Three minutes from shutter to Facebook :)

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Hi,

First, thanks heaps for Bittorrent Sync. It's lightyears ahead from the competition (sluggish owncloud esp.). Fantastic work !

One single request : please make it possible to change the WebUI's password FROM the WebUI.

Some explanations : I want several users to be able to sync files. If I give them a single URL to the WebUI, everybody will be able to see each other's secrets. So, I have 1 btsync instance for each user, on a different port. But the password is still "password", so it's still as unsecure. People can't ssh and change the .config for 2 reasons : Synology's sshd doesn't allow this, and they wouldn't know how.

Another (better?) option would be to implement proper multi-user support; but I'm not sure it's in the spirit of btsync, and would be difficult (for instance, if I run btsync as root, any user can see ALL files in the WebUI ! Simply go to Add Folder ...)

[EDIT]

In fact this would be much better : https://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/16836-support-for-untrusted-encrypted-node/

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This is easily fixed by running a seperate btsync (on different ports and different .sync direcotries) for every user.

Administrationwise, this is a pain, but for a few users, this works like a charm.

You could script it into an init script which starts on a configurable userbase or something.

Thanks, I've read about this fix in this forum already but it would still be nice to only need one process and one port, so I put it on my list. ^^ But I'll go to check out if this will work with systemd init, at least as a temporary solution.

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Dropbox/GDrive API support to buffer time-shifted syncronisation?

As I understand SyncApp only syncs when both computers ar switched on.

Picture following example: I work in a 2-partner small business where we sync project-folders during office-time. This project folder has 50GB+ and we dont really want a pay-for sync service. On a typical day, less than 3GB of files are altered or created.

On some days I want to continue working at my home computer in the evening. But normally when my home-comp is up, my work-comp is down. How could they sync?

How about allocating a certain amount of space inside a Dropbox, where SyncApp automatically sends the newest files to, so that they are stored online. One could still remain in the free plans of dropbox/googledrive etc, and have these files ready no matter if the main computers are off.

I am not shure, if this is possible, or if dropbox and others would allow this use of their API. Alternatively, FTP-support would be nice for this purpose. Third possibility would be to do this on SyncApps "own" servers, like SoShare does, maybe with a pay plan depending on the buffer size.

This could probably be done using find, cp and the dropbox application.

Bash script to run daily:-

rm -r ~/DropboxFolder
mkdir ~/DropboxFolder
find ~/bitTorrentSync -mtime +1 -exec cp {} ~/DropboxFolder/{} \;

Or something along those lines, although, it would be interesting to see it built in.

5. Distributed storage, I think all of us could allocate some 100 - 1000000 :) Mb on our non critical PC`s.

This is a must, I have a few computers around the would that I lease that I'd be happy to dump a couple GB worth of data onto, and, because I'd never "need" the data from there, I would only use them to backup to and restore from, but never use "from" that node.

The app looks great and the interface is ideal! I do note that people what a scheduler, but a bandwidth limiter would also be an option - possibly even with calendar (no limits at night, and stricter limited at times when people want to phone on VOIP.

This can be done with a metric shit ton worth of programs, in fact, the majority of newer home routers (and pretty much any enterprise level router) have options to limit certain regex captured traffic at certain times & based on other conditions.

2 - Have like a buffer on the Internet to synchronize with a computer turned off. For example, I want to share between my computers 10gb, would be good to have the ability to set up a buffer (dropbox public/private folders, public/private folder google drive, etc) so that if I have disconnected computers, the information is going to be uploaded to these accounts ( let's say 5gb ), then in the other side, when I connect the other computers, they are going to start the sync from those accounts ( 5gb ).

That way two computers can be sync even if they are connected at different times.

Although it'd be useless to me, I'd also like to see this, just seems useful for people who had lots of PCs at different WAN locations all with poor upload speed. Something like dropbox could increase the speed by a lot (Upload it once to a fast server, download it fast from all other servers).

One thing I'd request however is:- KEEP THE FILES ENCRYPTED WHILE ON ANY 3RD PARTY SERVERS.

I'm pretty sure the thing that most people like about this is that the data is ours and only ours (Well, impossible to prove this since it's closed source, but, apparently that's how it is).

First, awesome! I appreciate that most everything on my wishlist has already been asked, but it's all just a bunch of +1's

- A file serve only mechanism, where local copies are not kept, but files can still be downloaded with the benefits of the bittorrent protocol via WebDAV or ordinary web interface. That way a user is not limited to the hard drive size of his smallest computer.

- Per computer priority settings that allow user to maintain file sync capability, but use less bandwidth on slower or data limited connections. This is not the same as straight bandwidth limits, as setting the upload rate to 0 would disable syncing completely, but any higher setting would pull data from a limited computer when there are copies available from other places.

- The ability to host data in incomplete and encrypted form, providing higher storage efficiency (think RAID5), more redundancy, and higher performance with the use of otherwise unused free space. This is akin to the idea of donating free hard drive space without having access to another user's files. Could be implemented using a global secret.

- Versioning, both for backup and bandwidth efficiency purposes

- Transparent handling of the nested folder issue

I realize these concepts that may seem simple actually mean massive amounts of extra complexity. This is just my feeling on how this app would best serve everyone's needs.

Keep up the great work!

Ding ding ding ding. I concur with ever idea you had in that post.

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  1. Versioning
  2. Browing per-file version history
  3. Randomise ports on startup (Windows & Mac)
  4. Published protocol and API
  5. New type of secret key that allows creation of files, but cannot modify existing files
  6. GUI to manage sync ignore list on Windows & Mac
  7. Ability to revoke a secret key (use case: secret key is leaked)

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Sidenote on versioning: if it's implemented it should be optional so that people who don't want versioning don't have multiple files taking up space.

> Ability to revoke a secret key (use case: secret key is leaked)

As I understand it, the secret key is part of what's used to encrypt contents while they're being transferred. So there's no way to revoke a secret key: if an attacker has both the data transferred and the secret key, then there's no way to go back and take away the secret key to prevent the attacker from decrypting the data, because the data has already been transferred.

Also, if you just want to update the secret key and there hasn't been any attacker monitoring your traffic, then all you have to do is switch the secret key in configuration.

Edit: oh, and please add ability to set read only secret in the configuration file, there doesn't seem to be such a feature yet.

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  1. Versioning
  2. Browing per-file version history
  3. Randomise ports on startup (Windows & Mac)
  4. Published protocol and API
  5. New type of secret key that allows creation of files, but cannot modify existing files
  6. GUI to manage sync ignore list on Windows & Mac
  7. Ability to revoke a secret key (use case: secret key is leaked)

Can I ask why on earth you'd want to randomize ports? I've never understood when programs offer random ports, I've literally never used random ports in my whole life unless it requires me to do weird stuff to make a static port to work.

Anyway, I concur with numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5. As for 7, can't you just change the secret key on all the devices? I've not tried, so, I may be wrong.

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I'm sorry if any of these points have been posted before, but right now I don't have the time to read the whole thread. However, what I'd like to see is:

  • A way to pause synching, doing this for individual folders would be great
  • Simple scripting for the Linux WebUI (or some other way), i.e. to start and stop the synching if pausing is implemented or to list the folders and their current state
  • Encrypted storage: Special kind of Read-Only token where the client only gets encrypted files or blocks (blocks would have less information about the files but may be harder to implement). However, the client can still be used as a source for other clients that have normal Read-Only or Full-Access tokens

I think that's the all the things I noticed so far. Other than that I'm going to wait for the Android App, as soon as it will be released I'll probably ditch Dropbox completely.

Edited by GreatMarko
Struck-through items are suggestions which now have their own dedicated threads in the Feature Requests forum
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Linux version:

Add the IP addresses selection of admin web page hosting.

It's not safe to publish this page on all IP addresses.

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about, but if you simply don't want to have the Web UI served on all network devices, change the "listen" field of "webui" to the IP you want it served on. For me that's either a VPN IP or localhost (with either local access or an Apache reverse proxy for outside access with SSL).

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Request: a mirror option for the read only shares.

I have a situation where I use btsync to update program files that are running during the day, I kill the procccess for an hour in the middle of the night and then start up btsync so tomorrows runs will reflect any changes done during the day.

The issue is that sometimes the program 'semi'-locks the files telling the os that they're still being used in some capacity which causes the sync to fail, to prevent this I first force delete the primary db file (which is just a few mb's) and then after that start up btsync.

My problem here is that btsync's read-only mode is a currently a one time one way sync instead of a mirror sync, so any delete files stays deleted on the drive that is getting synced unless I actually made any changes to that specific file that day.

My wishlist request is that you add a toggle that makes a read only sync into a mirror sync instead which replaces/deletes files untill it becomes a exact mirror, instead of only syncing / replacing the files that have been recently modified.

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Can you make it optional to assign a read-write key to a folder.

I have some folders that I wish to sync with read keys only.

For these folders : i want absolutely 0 chances that someone collisions my key and erases everything on my folder.

Having to set a list of trusted hosts on each node and on each folder isn't realistic.

cf. http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/8620-wishlist/


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I am currently stepping back all my personal information from my work machine and only using apps on protableapps enabled flashdrive, only I still am using dropbox. I love the idea of the bittorrent sync solution. but I would like to see it able to sync my flash drive with my other computers. This whole solution solves two problems. if I never walk back into work again there is nothing to remove from the work computer and if I loose my flash drive I have lost no data.

What I see so far is great (have not used it yet) just wanted to add another idea to the wish list.

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I am currently stepping back all my personal information from my work machine and only using apps on protableapps enabled flashdrive, only I still am using dropbox. I love the idea of the bittorrent sync solution. but I would like to see it able to sync my flash drive with my other computers. This whole solution solves two problems. if I never walk back into work again there is nothing to remove from the work computer and if I loose my flash drive I have lost no data.

What I see so far is great (have not used it yet) just wanted to add another idea to the wish list.

You can select the folder to be an external device? There's no issue with that one, the only issue is that you can't state two folders to sync the same data on one computer (without the use of something like sandboxie), E.G. internal and external.

Also, I wouldn't recommend dumping files on a flash drive, they have limited amounts of write space and (from my experience) wear down fast.

EDIT:- Just thought I'd state, I've only used the linux version. Yet to touch the windows version because:-

A. I only run a single 128GB SSD on my windows box, I don't really have much to sync, if you get my drift.

B. My windows box is connected to my linux box which has 15TB worth of space (Which is running BTSync)

In the windows version (Due to how it mounts), it very well might not work. I have no idea.

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My apologies if this is a duplicate request ...

On the web interface e.g. http://localhost:8888/gui/ (using firefox) I see a list of my folders and a column labelled Sharing. In the Sharing column, there are three buttons, 1- Get secret, 2- a gear, 3- a red X.

These should have hover-help hints for what will happen when I click on them. Right now the red X drops the shared directory immediately.

The little left/right arrows and up/down arrows shown when syncing is being done would also benefit from hints that say more about what is happening.

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BitTorrent sync looks absolutely wonderful, I think it should be a really good fit to my sync needs.

This is my BTSync wish list, in priority order. Obviously, you guys are already working on most or all of these, but I'd like to chip in my requests and priorities...

1 Conflict resolution: has to be absolutely top of the list for a functional sync app!

2 Windows service: currently, both devices being synchronised have to have users logged in simultaneously to sync - BTSync available as a service on Windows would fix this (both machines would have to be switched on, but not logged in).

3 Cloud cache: for true time-shifted sync, diff files could perhaps be stored on the Cloud until the partner device could pick them up; I would be prepared to pay BitTorrent a (hopefully small!) fee for such a service.

4 Versioning! This would make BTSync unbelievably useful. Git manages versioning in a highy space-efficient way: perhaps BTSync could use a similar approach?

5 Differential comparisons: rsync only transmits the changed parts of files, I'm sure BTSync could do similarly, which would improve performance (and reduce file storage of Cloud cache).

6 Android version

Edited by GreatMarko
Struck-through items are suggestions which now have their own dedicated threads in the Feature Requests forum. Greyed out items have since been implemented
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3 Cloud cache: for true time-shifted sync, diff files could perhaps be stored on the Cloud until the partner device could pick them up; I would be prepared to pay BitTorrent a (hopefully small!) fee for such a service.

I'd like to vote down this (with all due respect). But say that the solution could come from any other private provider that simply accepts share keys and has btsync running constantly. My reasoning being that the application itself should be kept private.

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Can I just go balls to the wall with this concept?

Turn it into a complete file system where everyone stores everyone else's data. Call it, the Ubercloud. Files have one of three states on any given computer:

1. Fully contained on the computer's hard drive

2. Symbolically linked to the data distributed across the ubercloud

3. Contained in encrypted fragments with multiple redundancy across the ubercloud

Sharing a file is a matter of sending a symbolic file with encryption and tracking data. Users can dynamically change between symbolically stored on their drive and fully stored. Being symbolically stored is like accessing a file over a samba share, where it gets pulled before it is opened.

Fairness would have to be dealt with in terms of shared space, uptime and bandwidth for any given computer. It would create an economy of trading space and upload bandwidth for space and download bandwidth.

I know that this is far outside of the realm of Btsync in its current state, but I figured most people had this thought and were too polite to say it. But I think its fun to entertain anyway.

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Another wishlist would be for btsync to support sparse files.

All modern filesystems implement sparse files, although it usually has to be flagged/enabled by the application doing the writing, and isn't by default (for reasons of fragmentation).

However, lots of us are now running large arrays and/or SSD and fragmentation becomes less of an issue.

Say I want to sync a VMware VMFS that's created as a sparse 100 GB file but only has 3 GB currently allocated. I would want btsync to only transfer the 3 GB, and keep the file sparse on all other sync partners.

TrueCrypt is another application that can use large, sparse files (albeit with slightly less security).

I think sparse files are also a way to maintain a large file such as VMFS or TrueCrypt volume so that btsync only syncs the changed 4 MB blocks because the filesize doesn't ever appear to change, even though the real data being maintained on the disk is much smaller. You can think of the filesystem as being "oversubscribed."

Perhaps btsync already supports sparse files; I haven't checked. But I doubt it since few people seem to think about sparseness but me. :D

EDIT: btsync apparently does not support sparseness presently, as @thunder inadvertently pointed out in an earlier post. He suggested adding gzip/compression to the transfers so an empty 10 MB file wouldn't transfer all 10 MB. I agree that some very fast, lightweight encryption (lzjb would be great!) would be great, but in this particular case, making btsync aware of sparseness solves the problem.

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