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BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That

This article is more than 10 years old.

A colleague recently passed on a link to BitTorrent Sync with a note saying he planned on canceling his Dropbox account.  Sync is a file storage service, one for very large files. And if you have it, you too might be reconsidering your online file storage strategy.

On the face of it, BitTorrent is cooking up a strong challenger to all those  cloud-based, consumer-centric storage solutions that are now taking over the enterprise. Box.Net, Huddle, be on your guard.

But what is BitTorrent really all about? If you're not a developer or into movie transfers you might not know. So here is a quick run down on BitTorrent and Sync.

BitTorrent is probably best known for moving films around the Internet, though Brett Nishi, Director of Product Management, also points out that the BitTorrent protocol is used by scientists on the Human Genome Project and by those on the Large Hadron Collider, to push data around.

Based in San Francisco, BitTorrent employs only 120 people,  which is small when you consider that the user-base accounts for between 20 - 40% of all Internet traffic on a daily basis.

They now have 170 million monthly active users and 40 million daily active users. It makes you wonder why more of us are not talking about them.

The probable answer to that is that BitTorrent is primarily an engineering company, addressing fundamental problems of the Internet. But it is coming out of that shell, specifically with Sync. It is also offering help to build developer skills in distributed storage applications.

Synch is a file storage service built on a distributed architecture. It will do many of the things Dropbox does for you, but for free - it is currently in Alpha. This is how Nishi describes it.

It offers unlimited, secure and fast syncing. There are no file size limits and the speed of transfer is only limited by your Internet connection. With Sync, there is no need to route through the cloud which can slow things down. And because there is no cloud-based server involved, your files are also kept private and stored only on devices you choose.

Sync proved to be very popular in its opening two weeks of the open Alpha over 1 petabyte of data was synced by users. "On a daily basis we have seen that translate to roughly 70 terabytes a day," says Nishi.  So does it present a threat to existing, high growth file storage companies?

We may be in the same space for some users, but BitTorrent Sync is really a very different product that is built in a very different way. We are using the power of distributed architectures to enable faster, more efficient data transfer, and have heard from a lot of users that they want better control over how their valuable data is managed. Speed, size, privacy and control are fundamental to the design and delivery of BitTorrent Sync. We think there is a market for a product that delivers on these values.

Anyone out there with media properties, or who are developing services around media production and distribution, for example in content discovery, the company also has an accelerator program to help developers take advantage of peer to peer technology. See more at the BitTorrent Acceleration program. The program opens up BitTorrent's innovation lab to new media start-ups.

Maybe Sync is not an out-and-out DropBox killer, but it does look likely to broaden the scope of what we understand by file storage and change what customers expect from file storage services. All that in an area of growing interest for any enterprise, as well as end consumers.

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