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This post is roughly 10 years old; originally published on June 21, 2014! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
I’ve replaced Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync.
In order to do this I’ve have btsync running on a VPS (2CPU, 2GB, 400GB), my
home server and assorted Arch Linux workstations.
I had a couple of reasons for migrating away from Dropbox.
- Dropbox was costing $100 per year.
- Dropbox encryption model is weak and I have data security/privacy.
The VPS I am running BitTorrent Sync on costs $50 per year and provides four
times the storage. I run btsync on a VPS so that there is always a server
“in the cloud” that is available to sync with so that my setup emulates what
Dropbox used to do.
All my servers are running Debian and this is how I install btsync on
Debian.
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL http://debian.yeasoft.net/add-btsync-repository.sh)"
sudo apt-get install btsync
This is how I respond to the prompts:
* Do you want to define a default BitTorrent Sync instance? : YES
* BitTorrent Sync Daemon Credentials: yourusername
* BitTorrent Sync Daemon Group: yourusername
* Niceness of the BitTorrent Sync Daemon: 0
* On which portnumber should BitTorrent Sync listen? 0
* BitTorrent Sync Listen Port: 12345
* Do you want BitTorrent Sync to request port mapping via UPNP? NO
* Download Bandwith Limit: 0
* Upload Bandwith Limit: 0
* Web Interface Bind IP Address: 0.0.0.0
* Web Interface Listen Port: 8888
* The username for accessing the web interface: yourusername
* The password for accessing the web interface: yourpassword
As you’ll see, I don’t use UPNP on my VPS. I elect a specific port (not
actually 12345 by the way) and open that port up with ufw. I also only
allow access to the WebUI port from another server I own which reverse
proxies via nginx.
btsync works really well, I have it syncing hundreds of thousands of
files that amount to several hundred gigabytes of data. On my Arch Linux
workstations I use the brilliant btsync-gui
and BitTorrent Sync is also available for Android.
That said, I still use a free Dropbox account to sync photos from mine and my wife’s Android phones. I have a Dropbox instance running on my home file server and everyday it runs a script to automatically import these photos into Plex.
Such a shame, that at the time of writing, btsync is closed source :-(
Maybe that will change but if it doesn’t syncthing
may well be the answer when it has matured a little.