BitTorrent has long billed its Sync file-sharing service as a peer-to-peer alternative to cloud storage, but on Wednesday the company announced it's working with Onehub on a new, combined offering for large businesses.
Onehub Sync integrates BitTorrent Sync into Onehub's online file-storage service through what the two companies call a hybrid, peer-to-peer+one approach. The result is said to combine the benefits of syncing directly between peers with using Onehub as a "persistent peer" that's always available in the cloud.
BitTorrent's Sync service requires at least two peer computers to be connected for file sharing to occur. With Onehub Sync, the cloud part of the equation means that users' Onehub Sync clients will always have a peer to connect with, ensuring that their content can stay current.
"Sync is ideal for organizations with hundreds of people, or individual workgroups," said Erik Pounds, vice president of product management for BitTorrent Sync, in a blog post announcing the news. Onehub is well-suited to companies of all sizes and delivers key features for enterprises, he said.
The combined offering provides numerous benefits for large enterprises, including speed, scalability, reliability and security, Pounds said.
(Score: 2, Informative) by FrogBlast on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:59AM
That's about right. I use it to backup my TV shows and personal photos and videos across a couple of machines. I've tried to use it to provide files to other people instead of DropBox, but it hasn't really taken with anyone else I know. You can give read/write or read-on,y keys to the files, so it could potentially be a part of a lot of larger projects - email-like messages,a social media platform, podcast distribution.
One of the main selling points was that you don't have to rely on a big company to keep your secrets, so it seems odd that they've partnered with a cloud-something-or-other for enterprise-this-and-that. If you're "enterprise", just install it on your own beefy machine, and it will do the same thing in a way you can control.
Tragically, the 2.0 release was netuered. They promised not to remove features , but in the end they introduced limits that make it a bad choice for most interesting projects. Version 2.0 has a 10-folder maximum, and they removed the ability to share "keys" easily. It's been eplaced it with an unsettling "identity" system - controlled by them - that takes away the ability to sync only specific folders on specific machines. This all to push users towards a the new "Pro" version, which requires a ludicrous $40 per year subscription.
If you can find an installer for version 1.4, it can be very useful. A lot of early users have apparently switched to SyncThing, but I can't be bothered.