Just a reminder that BTSync is closed source and the protocol it uses has not been released.

Better FOSS versions exist - the best one that I know of (and which I currently use) is http://syncthing.net/

Sounds good I'll take a look.

Didn't really know about it, started using btsync when it launched never searched for alternatives since.

There's also seafile

> Why would i ever use Dropbox

Because setting up and maintaining your own server is a lot more work than a click and a download. And a single server is a single point of failure, whereas Dropbox's architecture isn't, whereas downloads speeds will be limited to your upload speeds when you are away from home, whereas many other reasons such as sharing, and the Dropbox ecosystem.

Is that high speed really necessary or that high reliability.

So what if the sever goes down for a few minutes or a hour sometime, your files will just sync when it comes up.

A small virtual server in a data center can do a decent job of it.

> high reliability

For pictures of my family, yes that high reliability is worth it, I don't want to permanently lose a single photo because of a hardware or software failure. I backup my dropbox to s3 via Arq and also have a IFTTT that pushes photos to the free TB of space flickr gives everyone.

You have a backup on every device you choose to sync and if one of these devices happens to be a server with a copy-on-write file system like btrfs[1] i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure.

[1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Btrfs

> i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure.

Unless you happened to live in New Orleans in 2005. And really of all that sounds like a lot of work to set up and maintain for the near zero chance that some government type wants to spy on me to look at harmless and boring pictures of my pets and family.

If you really care for privacy, you should consider something for which source code is fully available and have client side encryption. To me, Dropbox, Google Drive and btsync are all the same.

How is btsync (closed source, possibly giving access to all your data to bittorrent.com) different from dropbox (closed source, storing your data on ec2)?

The protocol is open source and as far is i know you don't see it sending your secret key to some shady servers without permission at the same time the data is constantly in your possession be that one of your servers or your clients.

I admit that the client being closed source is not ideal however i would still call it more private then Dropbox or Google Drive.