BTSync has released an updated Version 2 - and there is lots of unhappiness being expressed in their user forums.
They have released a free version with reduced functionality (10 folder limit), and a subscription-based premium version which many are complaining is too expensive.
Let’s get ready for our community to expand, and please be nice to new users who will be asking lots of questions! 
It’s more than that. I have been a very long-ime user of BTSync. Inadvertently installed version 2. Saw my folders migrated, but in 1.4 format. Then I realized there is a 10 folder limit. Seeing it is not enough, I wanted to go back to v1.4. But after that point, even deleting all shares and trying to re-add, somehow I couldn’t make a connection between the programs (desktop & mobile). This is in addition to unbearable dumbing-down which makes is too hard to make it work as I want, or even understand what is going on.
I have no idea what you’re talking about and the fact that this is my first post should not in any way be considered an indicator of my knowledge of SYNC_APPLICATION. I’m not quite sure what my refugee status is yet, but I’m trying to give them a chance to backpedal and not be totally knee jerk.
But anyway, with regard to SyncThing, I use btsync to keep various family photos (probably around 60,000 at this point), family videos (maybe 100gb), documents (including the My Documents folder and associated subfolders), plus have a backup of particular directories on a few Android devices (DCIM, an app backup folder, the download directory), etc. Am I liable to make SyncThing choke on all of this? Does it have any issues with particular file types or sizes?
I’m going to install it on a couple of machines and see how it does, but any insights would be helpful.
Thanks!
I doubt that will choke SyncThing,
I use it as a BTSync replacement as I thought it went a bit south a while ago, I have never seen it have a problem and I use it over VPN’s and the like. Its much more robust that BTSync when you get it ticking over.
Best part is the android app can be targeted directly at SyncThing servers, :3 Somthing BTSync never did.
One of said new (refugee?) users here. I was immensely disappointed by BT Sync’s decisions with 2.0 only to become immensely excited to find Syncthing.
Looking forward to joining/contributing to the community here : D
Ever since they introduced the Alpha of BTSync my Spidey sense started going off. I’ve actually been testing SyncThing for a bit and might be making the switch. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of us from the BTSync forums heading this way. If SyncThing can handle my needs, I’ll be donating what BTSync wanted to charge to this project out of sheer spite.
Huh, I think I’ll do it anyways because a) this move shows me that I was stupid not follow my instincts early on and go with the FOSS option when I started using Sync (at the time it was simpler and more robust than ST, hopefully this has changed), and b) the rate of development of this project is insane and it just deserves as much, if for nothing else than because they’re doing something tangible about this mess of a spyware internet we’re living in.
The thing Sync had over ST and that I much preferred, was the public/private key things as a means of linking folders. No usernames, no authentication processes, no accounts. Alas, even that they screwed up with this new release, and while they claim the old system will still continue to function, well, now they’re just no longer trustworthy.
Hopefully this will change in the future on ST, since one of my uses of BTsync was to have some folders being massively shared with many, many people, a process that as far I understand ST to work would require me to manually accept and perhaps even add each user individually.
Hello everybody,
Well, I am a BTSync user and although I have know about Syncthing for a while a haven’t had the time to test it (and implement it).
Yesterday I downloaded BTSync 2.0 and I am utterly disappointed as it breaks compatibility with 1.4 (they say it works but it doesn’t really).
I was already unhappy with 1.4 since they changed the UI and let’s be fair, sometimes it just doesn’t work and reports of bugs are not taken very seriously sometimes.
So here I am, testing Syncthing and ready to move on (although it is going to be a real pain as I have 40 or so BTSyncs on the wild running on laptops).
As a new user I would like to give you my first impressions (just in case some one is reading).
THE GOOD:
I don’t like the UI very much, I think it needs improvement, but I prefer it over BTSync. I like that it has information about the version the other clients are using and that it can be accessed using a web browser (which I believe was a feature on BTSync for Linux but not for Windows).
I like that syncthing.exe is console executable. Easy to run as a service although it is not a service itself. Maybe something for the future. I also like the dual process approach.
I like that it is open source
THE BAD:
Doesn’t use much memory but God it can overload the CPU.
Disk access: Probably because it doesn’t use much memory it does read/write to disk too often too much (been monitoring the *.ldb files). Probably it should have some sort of optional cache so you can choose between disk usage or memory usage.
It doesn’t seem to handle large amounts of files very well. For my first test I am trying to sync 940k files (around 137GB) between too machines over the internet (both have a 1GB pipe) and after 24 hours only 60k and 4GB have been transferred. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the speed between the nodes, some transfer happens at 20 or 30 Mbps then it all stops and both machines start using the CPU heavily until there is another burst of data.
I am going to do further tests with smaller data sets, maybe I have more luck in that department.
I am going to follow the development very closely and I will try to help if I can (I am an a ex software developer turned IT Manager / Consultant and sometimes I still feel the need to read and write some code…)
Not to derail the thread, but Mexter could you tell me how to get SyncThing on Android to select a folder on an external SD card? This has been an on-going problem with Android apps, that I thought had finally died. Other apps you have to pull down a menu to change the path, or you can manually enter one.
Thanks for any insight!
Dave
This is how I do it
I type it directly into the web interface.
Wow, that was fast! Thanks.
So the web interface lets you type in the full path manually? Cool…I can do that! I didn’t realize there was a web interface on Android - I’dd have to check that out.
Turns out there’s an option for an advanced file explorer interface. Not sure why they’d turn it off since EXT cards don’t show without it, and I would guess most Android sync would be for externals!
Thanks again for a speedy reply.
No worries,
To access the web interface, just swipe in from the left and there an option to take you there.
Sure glad someone else responded! I’m one of the new users! (And my current android lacks an sd card slot)
So far, so good. I’ve only tested small scale so far, but I actually like the interface a lot more than btsync.
External sd cards should actually show up by default, no idea why they don’t.
And no need to use the web interface, just enable the advanced folder picker in settings.
I’m also a BTSync user, very possibly to soon be a non-BTSync user, and have a few questions I hope someone can help me with. Mostly these are feature/usage situations that I expect to encounter, or BTSync functionality I haven’t seen yet in my poking around this site.
1 - I have a Raspberry PI which I use as my “always on” sync point. It syncs data to/from a disk attached to my router and accessed via Samba. There are two issues here: – shared files will never be changed other than by Syncthing, so there is really no reason to rescan the disk at all, and I don’t want to keep it from spinning down. Sounds like I can set a long rescan interval and this will be OK? – I currently have this set up as a “read only” share in BTSync, to prevent accidents (on the PI or router or whatever) from propagating to my other devices. Is there a similar “read only share” concept in Syncthing? (“encrypted read only” shares is another nice feature to allow people to “back up” each others sensitive files).
2- I’ve seen some discussions here about “selective download” or “sync on demand” – I regard this as a VERY useful feature, particularly for my phone where I want access to all my music but don’t have enough local storage. It is nice to be able to download an album or two, delete them when done, redownload later, etc. Hopefully something like this that is easy to use can be implemented soon?
3- Is there some way to bypass the Syncthing central server? My PI has a fixed DNS name, and if everyone can find each other by finding it, that would be ideal.
That sounds like enough to get started. I think I’ll try Syncthing on a couple of machines this weekend and see how it goes.
Thanks!
(PS – I keep running out of space in this composer window – my text going off the bottom and I have to resize this browser pane. Is there some way to get a scroll bar here or is this intentional to keep posts short?)
You can set it to 0, which means it will never be rescanned. Or use inotify if you want to avoid rescanning, but still want to have correctness.
There is a master folder approach, but that means that NOBODY can modify the files apart from the device syncthing is running on.
You can ignore files (ala .gitignore) but that’s a bit hard to use (as it is now).
You can run your own discovery server on the PI in that case, and just configure your devices to use that. Sadly, it now requires postgres (or you could probably compile a version which uses sqlite)
Thanks Nutomic - I found the option to turn on the advanced file explorer, solved that problem!
I saw inotify, and will check into that for my other machines. Hopefully the inotify behavior can be built in to syncthing directly for ease of use. But for the PI, 0 is probably fine, thanks.
Sounds like that will work for most of my needs, I’ll check it out.
I saw that discussion also – I’m just hoping that a simple interface can be built for this capability. Sounds like some folks are talking about it, which is good.
Great! I have no need to do that right now, I’m just thinking long term. I don’t want to rely on this and then have syncthing shut down their discovery server and be stuck. As long as I CAN run my own, that is great, but I probably won’t.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Knew they would be coming 2 months ago 
Automatic node discovery like Bittorrent-Sync - #10 by Rewt0r
Guys, wake up, this is a huge opportunity for you if you want it!
Honestly, my impression is that I don’t think you guys are aspiring to be the answer, and you don’t care enough about providing a smooth Windows installation experience (neither nssm nor syncthingtray are good in their present state for the common user), an iOS client, or even an iOS-compatible source code license. IIRC even the android fork is hampered by the license. (Without anyone starting a competitor to SyncThing, I consider open sourcing the protocol a mere gimmick, albeit a nice one). Please correct me if I’m wrong. If you don’t care, you don’t care, and that’s fair enough. But please consider the opportunity that lies before you. Being a part of something big, money, helping mankind, technical satisfaction – I’m not sure what might motivate potential contributors, but these are all possible.
I think it is tragic that neither BTSync nor SyncThing seems to be on the course of solving sync for everybody, but I hope whatever project comes next (or whatever new contributors join SyncThing or a fork of it) can learn from the shortsightedness of these two and finally get it right.
I started reading one thread on the BTSync forum and kept getting more upset as I was reading it until I wrote my own rant: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/34291-i-was-in-support-of-sync-20-right-up-till-they-broke-a-promise/page-7. There is a huge amount of savvy upset users who really feel trust was violated with BT Inc., and are jumping ship. I for one had half jumped to SyncThing, but now I will fully switch over and be sad at the uselessness of my iOS devices. It is like BTSync cultivated a userbase for SyncThing – but are you ready? …