BitTorrent Wants Alpha Testers for "Sync", Competition For Dropbox and Others

BitTorrent remains alive and well while many of its P2P competitors have bit the dust in recent years, but the company is not sitting around simply hoping it can avoid the same fate; instead, BitTorrent is evolving, working hard on new products and technologies including Live Streaming, sharing large files directly to Facebook friends, and most recently, a tool that enables users to synchronize files between their computers via “secure, distributed technology.”

“Sync”, as the new service will be called, sounds a lot like the sort of sync capabilities offered by cloud storage services such as Dropbox offer, but without the cloud storage element; in other words, your files can stay synced across all your devices (mobile and otherwise, it appears) without having a cloud hub do the heavy lifting.

BitTorrent Sync

Sync is in the pre-Alpha phase, and BitTorrent is looking for brave testers. If we can infer anything from the tester application form, it would appear that Sync will be able to make use of NAS storage. Indeed, BitTorrent told GigaOM that Sync would sync files directly between machines with no cloud caching.

Further, files will be protected with AES 256-bit encryption and will have native apps for Windows (from before Vista through Windows 8 and Windows RT), Mac OS X, and Linux, with mobile versions likely forthcoming, as well.