Setting up BitSync on Debian

Martin Wimpress

I’ve replaced Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync. In order to do this I’ve have btsync running on a VPS (2CPU, 2GB, 400GB), my home server and assorted Arch Linux workstations.

I had a couple of reasons for migrating away from Dropbox.

Dropbox was costing $100 per year.
Dropbox encryption model is weak and I have data security/privacy.

The VPS I am running BitTorrent Sync on costs $50 per year and provides four times the storage. I run btsync on a VPS so that there is always a server “in the cloud” that is available to sync with so that my setup emulates what Dropbox used to do.

All my servers are running Debian and this is how I install btsync on Debian.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL http://debian.yeasoft.net/add-btsync-repository.sh)"
sudo apt-get install btsync

This is how I respond to the prompts:

Do you want to define a default BitTorrent Sync instance? : YES
BitTorrent Sync Daemon Credentials: yourusername
BitTorrent Sync Daemon Group: yourusername
Niceness of the BitTorrent Sync Daemon: 0
On which portnumber should BitTorrent Sync listen? 0
BitTorrent Sync Listen Port: 12345
Do you want BitTorrent Sync to request port mapping via UPNP? NO
Download Bandwith Limit: 0
Upload Bandwith Limit: 0
Web Interface Bind IP Address: 0.0.0.0
Web Interface Listen Port: 8888
The username for accessing the web interface: yourusername
The password for accessing the web interface: yourpassword

As you’ll see, I don’t use UPNP on my VPS. I elect a specific port (not actually 12345 by the way) and open that port up with ufw. I also only allow access to the WebUI port from another server I own which reverse proxies via nginx.

btsync works really well, I have it syncing hundreds of thousands of files that amount to several hundred gigabytes of data. On my Arch Linux workstations I use the brilliant btsync-gui and BitTorrent Sync is also available for Android.

That said, I still use a free Dropbox account to sync photos from mine and my wife’s Android phones. I have a Dropbox instance running on my home file server and everyday it runs a script to automatically import these photos into Plex.

Such a shame, that at the time of writing, btsync is closed source :-( Maybe that will change but if it doesn’t SyncThing may well be the answer when it has matured a little.

References

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