Bit Torrent for Home

Working from home. The network has slowed down to a crawl. Now what?

[Update 2018 Oct 21]

This morning this post, came out into my focus again as it poped-up among the most popular ones. Who or what made these views I do not know. In any case: welcome.

Anyway. Bit Torrent Sync is now called “Resilio” Inc. They have built a company around it. And it appears there is a free version for personal use.

Please check here. I think I am going to install this on all my devices, and a few more, and use.

Sometimes we need to say: “Just say no to the cloud”.

[Original Aticle]

No, BitTorrent technology is not part of every Windows 10. That was just a catchy title. But, really why not? Why is this technology not built into a “personal” OS, present on hundreds of millions of active desktops? Like e.g. Windows 10 is, for example?

[What is torrenting?  An awesome, comprehensive post]

Here is my little cute use case from yesterday to prove the point. Visual Studio 2017 “Community Edition”. Free. Great but. That is 6+ GB of an ISO file. To copy this from my main machine to my laptop, over WiFi, from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and from my study to my bedroom, it takes approximately one hour! Over a pretty decent LAN, not a WiFi. Here is the Windows File Explorer copy dialogue.

To download this ISO it taketh even more.
To download this ISO it taketh even more.

OK, I could use a USB. But I am almost out of USBs. I do not use USBs anymore. I have both OneDrive and Google Drive accounts 15GB each. Free. So, like everybody else, I forgot my trusty USB and I can not find a useful one. USBs are in any case best medium for passing viruses. We are in 2017. Why should we suffer this?

Then I remembered. I already had BitTorrent Sync on my main machine. I tested it way back in 2014. I was very satisfied with this simple BitTorrent client that allows BitTorrent technology(1) to be used for comfortable personal “torrenting”.

By this I mean, to comfortably, copy or move any kind of files between any kind of machine. Keyword: comfortably. No USBs, no WiFi crappy router problems, no hassle.

Even from study to the bedroom, this is much more comfortable than relying on good old “net bios” and 1+ hour long copy dialogues on your Windows desktops.

BitTorrent on your LAN

 

BitTorrent Sync passing over Visual Studio ISO to my laptop.
BitTorrent Sync passing over Visual Studio ISO to my laptop.

It is a true “fire and forget” experience. Otherwise, if any of the two machines get shut down or something happens to the crappy wifi or home LAN router imposed by the resident ISP it is all over again: 1+ hour Windows copy dialogue. BitTorrent Sync is actually a “liberating experience”.

Not to mention a “man in the middle” liberating experience. Because torrent technology is such, there is simply no “man in the middle”. And I do not even have to hint what that actually means in this unfortunate “Post Snowden” era.

BitTorrent Sync conceptual diagram.
BitTorrent Sync v.s. Cloud, conceptual diagram.

 

And there is no veil of the Cloud. An ideal place for all sorts of well-wishers, traffic throttling, falsely encrypted, opportunities. Place where man-in-the-middle lives. Even between your study and your bedroom.

[I first published this on 27 Dec 2014]


 

(1) I beg to disagree. BitTorrent is not a protocol. It is a technology. BitTorrent protocol is just one facet of that technology.