BitTorrent Sync is cloud without risk

In these days of NSA snooping and built-in backdoors, do you really want your entire digital life in the cloud?

That’s one of the key reasons that BitTorrent has launched BitTorrent Sync, a way to help you manage your personal files in a cloud-like Dropbox-ish way, without the threat of government surveillance.

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“BitTorrent Sync is a syncing product (we are literalists here) to help manage personal files between multiple devices,” BitTorrent’s director of communications Christian Averill told VentureBeat. “It offers unlimited, secure file-syncing at no cost. With concerns Concerns about data privacy and security are currently at a peak, BitTorrent Sync has proven to be a timely technology and has been quite popular with our Alpha users.”

The product works pretty much exactly like Dropbox.

Set up BitTorrent Sync on your computer, select a folder to sync, generate a unique password, and then duplicate the procedure on any other device you want to set up syncing. All data transfers are encrypted, and no data is ever stored in the cloud. In addition — and a new twist for a peer-to-peer application — no files every pass through someone else’s computers.

“It’s simple. It’s free. It’s the awesome power of P2P, applied to file-syncing,” BitTorrent says.

BitTorrent launched in alpha in April, and nearly eight petabytes has already been synced with the product — almost as much data as exists in the entire Internet Archive. In one innovative use, a BitTorrent employee turned a Raspberry Pi into a personal cloud, and design teams have used BitTorrent Sync for file sharing purposes between teams.

BitTorrent Sync is free, works with large files “of any size,” and very secure — your password or “secret” is 32 characters long, and the app uses 256-bit security — and supports one-way sync as well.

An Android app is already available for mobile use, and an iOS app is coming soon.