Sync it yourself

CREATE YOUR OWN SECURE SYNCING NETWORK WITH NO LIMITS.

SYNCING, AS YOU’VE probably discovered, is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to share your key files with all of the roughly three million devices you now own, acting as both a backup solution and way to make sure your photos, music and documents are available on whatever device you’re using.

Most people use a cloud service like OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox to accomplish it. That has its advantages. They’re easy to set up, and there’s always a copy of your files stored in the cloud for you to recover. But they have their downsides as well: namely a monthly or annual cost for any volume larger than a few gigabytes; and the fact that your files are stored on somebody else’s servers, with the inherent security risks that poses.

But there are ways to create your own syncing cloud service, so that your devices will sync their files with each other without involving a third party. There are a number of free solutions available, but the one that remains our favourite is Resilio Sync, formerly known as BitTorrent Sync.

It’s one of the best ways to make sure that all your key files are available on all your devices without having to subscribe to or trust a cloud-based sync drive like Google Drive or Dropbox. A Resilio sync is all your own – no third party can see or access your files, and no data goes outside your network if you don’t want it to. And while Resilio now offers a commercial option, the free home version is still available, and it’s available on Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, and most NAS platforms, making it great for syncing across platforms.

We’ll walk through a common setup of Resilio, using a Windows PC and a Linuxbased NAS for an example. You can download it from www.resilio.com, and the Windows version will let you install it either as a service or as a regular app.

HOW RESILIO WORKS

The way the application works probably bears some explanation, since users of other syncing services may find its syncing model a little mind bending.

Resilio is completely peer to peer – it has no “server” and “client” architecture like you’ve experienced with most other syncing tools. Instead, on a particular device you designate a folder you’d like to sync with other devices. When you want to share that folder, Resilio will generate a key code or QR code.

Take that key to another device, or scan the QR code with your mobile, and the other device will sync with the folder, creating a new folder locally that is a mirror of the one you shared, and is constantly and continuously synced with the original folder over the internet. Conversely, on this second device you could also set up a shared folder, and sync the other way. No device is the master of truth – instead devices are syncing

with each other; the connection can go both ways.

You can sync a folder with as many people or devices as you like, and they will all get a copy of the contents. You can sync multiple folders as well, and select which devices get which folders – you could share one folder with your tablet and a different one with your phone, for example. You can sync with other people to share the content as well, although advanced access controls are only available in the paid ‘Pro’ version of Resilio.

CREATING A SYNC

To see this in action, let’s walk through the creation of a sync. For our example, we’ll sync our PC’s Pictures folder with a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. To do that, you would follow these steps:

The first thing to do is to add a folder on your PC to Resilio. This will allow it to be synced with other devices. Click on the ‘+’ button on the top left, and select Standard Folder. You’ll be asked to find a folder on your drive that you’d like to share and sync. Find and select the folder you’d like to sync on other devices (the Pictures folder, in our example).

Now you’ll be given the folder options. Do you want the sync to be read only, meaning that those who sync with it will download its current contents, but can never alter its contents remotely; or do you want read & write, which means that if another device puts something in the folder or changes a file then those changes will be synced back up to the source device? Here you can also specify that new devices trying to sync with the folder must be approved by you (if you de-select the box, they will automatically approve) and set limits on the shared link (more on that in a second).

Now let’s talk about this link. This is how you your other devices will be able to sync with this folder that you’ve just shared. For another device to sync with this folder you’ve just selected, you need to send that device a link, which is just a long string of random letters and numbers. How you get the link to the other device is up to you. If you click on the Email button, it will open your email with the link key code in it. If you click on the Copy button, it will copy the link to the clipboard. If you click on the Key tab, you can see the link (one for read only, one for read and write, and you could read it out over the phone for example). And finally, if you click on the QR tab, you’ll see the code in QR form, which is useful for syncing with mobile versions of Resilio.

Note that you can return to this key code screen at any time by clicking on the Share link next to the folder in the main Resilio window.

Now let’s actually use that link we’ve created. Head to another device with Resilio Sync installed. For our purposes, we’ll use a QNAP NAS with the Resilio Sync app installed. Open up the app, and click on the ‘+’ button. Then select ‘Enter a key or link’.

Paste in the key from the PC with the shared folder. You will be asked where you’d like to save the folder you’re syncing; after that, the folder will instantly be added. If you required permissions when you set up the shared folder, there may be a popup on the original PC, asking if you’d like to grant permission.

And that’s it – the folder has been shared. If you go back to your original PC, you’ll see that it now notes that there is one peer online, and Resilio will work in the background to keep the folders on both devices in sync with each other. If one goes offline, then it will sync as soon as it is back online.

You can add additional peers using the same method, and sync as many additional folders as you like by clicking on the ‘+’ button. You can add a synced folder on any device – we could, for example, sync a folder on the NAS back to the PC. There are no limits on the number of peers or on the size of the synced folders, so go nuts!