SyncThing as an alternative to BitTorrentSync (btsync)

A while ago I blogged about using BitTorrentSync as a privacy conscious alternative to the more popular cloud services like Google Drive or DropBox.

BitTorrent recently released btsync version 2 which, apart from trying to sell you a so called PRO version, changed the user interface yet again and also changed the way you set up your installations significantly. Actually, there seems to be no upgrade path, you have to configure your peers all over again. And, just in case that’s not enough incentive for looking for an alternative, the new Windows version does no longer run on Windows server OSes.

One possible alternative is SyncThing. It’s also peer to peer and the configuration is quite similar. In contrast to btsync it is open source. It is available for most desktop OSes and also for Android.

I tested the (official) 64 bit versions for Windows and Linux and it worked so far. For our Ubuntu server I used the initd script from the SyncThing forum. On Windows I just started the program in the console.

Next step is the Android version.