I’d messed around with BTSync a few weeks ago and was really excited by the possibilities of it. I’ve used Dropbox for years and it is a great app but it is prohibitively expensive for small teams that want to share a lot of files, not to mention it means everyone who wants access needs to commit to losing 1TB of space on their hard drive. Keeping data safe (resolving points of failure) – when people are ill or laptops fall from hotel balconies, how do we make sure our data is safe? Sharing designs with developers – when it’s time for implementation, what’s the best way to share files with the frontend and backend teams? Syncing large files between designers – we have over a terabyte of design assets stored between various computers and hundreds of megabytes more are created every week. What we needed (Or, key problems we were looking to solve) Hopefully others trying to do something similar will find this post useful. It wasn’t scalable and we were repeatedly having to reupload and resend assets as they got lost in inboxes.Ī couple of weeks ago we devised a new system to avoid as much of this pain as possible. It involved myself and Tom saving design files to our local machines, sharing them on Dropbox when we needed to and using a plethora of other tools (email, CloudApp etc) to share smaller bits & pieces. Up until recently, we employed an imperfect process at GoCardless to share designs files between teams.
Code is text though, and text is cheap to store, once you start having gigabytes and even terabytes of design assets things start to get tricky. Git is a lightweight tool that’s fast, reliable and easy to use (relatively, of course). The problem for designersįor developers, Git & Github are perfect for distributing, versioning and storing just about any codebase.
What got him excited about the product? It’s free and crazy fast.įind out how Alasdair saved his (and his team’s) sanity in this easy how-to, excerpted below.ĭevelopers have it easy. Alasdair set up BitTorrent Sync to sync, share, and secure huge design files.
In this edition of Sync Hacks: Alasdair Monk ( on how to solve the sharing-huge-files-amongst-large-teams problem. Can’t wait to hear what you guys cook up. If you have an interesting use or how-to, shoot us an email at. Sync is our free, unlimited, and secure file-syncing application. You can grab the BitTorrent Sync app from the ReadyNAS Add-on page to get started.In Sync Hacks, we spotlight cool uses of Sync from the creative minds of our users. Netgear is the first NAS maker that is supporting BitTorrent Sync on all its devices running OS version 6 or higher. A NAS is designed to run continuously, so it works more like one of those cloud storage services, but it’s your cloud. Support for NAS devices makes BitTorrent Sync much more appealing because you don’t need to worry about having a computer online all the time.
So if a desktop PC is where all the files are, you need to have it on and connected 24/7. That’s great for the privacy-minded since there’s no one looking over your shoulder, but the main drawback is that at least one copy of your data has to be online at all times to be accessible. Since your data is not stored on some server in a data center, it’s not under anyone else’s control. Without a centralized server to manage your data, BitTorrent Sync offers essentially unlimited storage - it will sync as much data as you have storage space. You can also share specific folders with others, which gives them access to the data and gives you another node for improving synchronization of that folder.
AES-encrypted bits are exchanged between nodes in a sort of personal p2p mesh network to keep everything up to date. Rather than saving your files in the cloud and shuffling that master record between connected devices, BitTorrent Sync stores files on all your authorized devices (or nodes) without the separate online repository.
The technology backing this service is the same thing that allows people to pirate Game of Thrones in record numbers every week.
Netgear is the first company to announce an official BitTorrent Sync app, but BitTorrent says that’s just the start. BitTorrent Sync uses the BitTorrent protocol to increase privacy and make sharing files easier, which I think can easily be classified as “good.” Now BitTorrent Sync is getting more useful with the addition of NAS support. BitTorrent has become essentially synonymous with illegal file sharing, but it’s merely a protocol that can be used for good or evil.