Today BitTorrent, Inc. announced BitTorrent Sync 1.4, a distributed peer-to-peer file synchronization platform that allows for large scale file sharing without the need for a central or cloud server. The file sharing platform is still in beta, but is free to download and try.

Individuals and large or small organizations often find themselves in need of sharing and distributing data. With individuals this often means for the necessity of backup or simply making sure that files stored on a work PC are also available on a home office PC—but in the BYOD era there’s also a smartphone and possibly a tablet also involved. For businesses, entire teams may need the same assets updated at the same time. This is where a solution such as BitTorrent Sync steps in.

The initial alpha of BitTorrent Sync launched a year ago and since then the software has reached over 10 million user installs and has transferred over 80 petabytes of data.

The company claims that the new update will fundamentally change how users interact with the platform and its apps. BitTorrent Sync is already an excellent platform for sharing files between different devices, systems, and locations—but update 1.4 adds several new mechanisms to share files with other parties.

To aid with sharing, BitTorrent Sync 1.4 has added links. A BitTorrent Sync user can produce a link to a file and then send that link via copy/paste, e-mail, or even display it as a QR code. The recipient using the link will then get added to the synchronization for that file once accepted.

BitTorrent Sync 1.4 beta is available now for users on Windows, OS X, and Linux and is free to download and use.

Examples of synchronizing files without the cloud

BitTorrent is still exploring various business models for both consumer and business levels and when Sync comes out of beta. For organizations and businesses there are obvious benefits to using a distributed file sharing system over a centralized server or cloud solution in the money it could save.

With a system such as BitTorrent Sync it is possible to securely share files behind a firewall (or through a firewall) without the need of buying into a cloud subscription service such as DropBox or OneDrive. Since all of the action occurs via software running on each of the devices, only internal network infrastructure matters.

The design team at Sommerseth Design, a multidisciplinary design agency based in Norway, used BitTorrent Sync to turn a USB raid system with 4 drives into a quick and easy shared storage hub for collaboration. The need arose because Sommerseth Design has employees spread across the world—between Norway, Poland, and Italy—who need to share extremely large files in order to coordinate editing. The solution proved cheaper than cloud for the small firm; and is capable of synchronizing extremely large Photoshop files with “gazillions” of layers.

A DevOps engineer at Angie’s List used the BitTorrent Sync API to develop a deployment tool called Overmind. Ken Erwin developed Overmind to reduce web deployment from hours to seconds.

Deployment is a root challenge for DevOps teams, especially any dealing with hundreds of similarly configured servers, and this issue was at the core of Erwin’s solution. Erwin saw that Twitter had suffered a similar challenge—centralized system, thousands of servers to update—and had turned BitTorrent for a solution. By combining BitTorrent Sync and Powershell for Windows, Erwin produced a tool (Overmind) that provided a simple GUI and now allows Angie’s List to deploy daily.

According to Erwin, the first use of Overmind was also the first deployment Angie’s List has had that required zero downtime.

Erwin has kindly made the tool publicly available (download [Zip file]) for other DevOps engineers interested in deploying Overmind on their own servers. It can install BitTorrent Sync automatically on all servers (using the Sync API and Powershell) and it’s completely customizable so that it can work in most environments.