How to… Sync and share files using your own network
What you need: Resilio Sync (free download) Time required: An hour
In March last year, Dropbox started limiting the number of devices between which non-paying users could sync their files. If you only ever use Dropbox on your tablet, phone and PC, you might not have noticed, but the moment you try to log in on a fourth device, it refuses. You need to pay for an upgrade before you can go any further.
That costs £7.99 a month if you pay for a year upfront, and an additional £2 a month if you opt for equal instalments. Granted, you get 2TB of online storage to play with, as well as advanced search, file recovery and more. But if all you want to do is keep your files in sync, you might baulk at paying £95 to £119 a year.
There’s a free alternative, though: peer-to-peer networking.
You’re probably using a peer-to-peer network already, without realising. Skype is a peer-to-peer telephony service, which chops up your call and passes it through a mesh of computers until it reaches its destination. In Windows 10, Windows performs a similar trick, allowing users to download updates from each others’ computers. Your own PC might even have been the source of somebody else’s update.
There are two benefits to sharing files this way. First, anyone who needs to send multiple recipients a big chunk of data, such as Microsoft with a major Windows update, doesn’t need to transmit the whole thing to everyone. It can send different parts to each recipient, who share them among each other.
Microsoft can serve more people in less time and everyone should get their updates sooner.
Second, and more importantly for you, the files move from machine to machine without resting online. This is commonly exploited by movie pirates who use peer-to-peer networking to share films without hosting them on servers that can be linked back to them through login details.
Here, we’ll show you how to use the same process to synchronise files between your own devices. As you won’t be using an online (cloud) server, there’s no charge or limit on space, so there’s no need to restrict what you’re sharing or pay for an upgrade. Better yet, there’s no three-device limit.
Download Bittorrent tool 1 Resilio Sync
There are several different peer-to-peer technologies, but we’ll be using Bittorrent. This chops up a file into equal-sized segments, called ‘pieces’, and sends them to the computers signed up to its network. In our case, they’ll be chunks of our own files, and the computers will be our own devices.
Because each ‘piece’ is the same size,
it doesn’t matter in which order each computer receives them. As long as they’re all received at some point, they can be reassembled to match the original. That means a break in transmission doesn’t matter: the next time one of your devices that needs a piece can connect to another of your devices that already has it, it will receive its own copy, which it uses to build its mirror of the original file.
If this sounds daunting, don’t worry:
we’ll use a free program called Resilio Sync (previously Bittorrent Sync) to automate the process from end to end.
Visit www.resilio.com/individuals and click Free Download, followed by Download Sync Home. When the download completes, launch it. As part of the installation, Resilio Sync will tick four boxes: create a Desktop icon, open Sync once it’s installed, configure the Windows Firewall and start the Sync service
when Windows starts. Keep at least the last three of these ticked; it’s up to you whether you let it add an icon to your desktop. Click Next, then Yes when asked if you want to make changes to Windows.
You need to provide a username, which identifies you when sending files (and can’t be changed later). You also have to agree to the privacy policy and licence agreement, and that you won’t use the software for business. If you’re happy with all of these terms, tick the appropriate boxes, then click ‘Get started’.
Add your first folders 2
Although it doesn’t host files on a central server, Resilio works in a similar fashion to a cloud service. You tell it which folders you want to share, and any files you drop into them will be sent to your other devices.
Start by clicking ‘+’ at the top of the window, then pick ‘Standard folder’. Navigate to the folder you want to add and click Select Folder. Resilio will now add the folder to the list of synchronised locations in the Sync Home window and open the Share box, which we’ll use to give another PC access to the files. It can then grab its own copy of the folder’s contents.
Synchronise between 3 computers
Set up Resilio Sync on a second PC or laptop. Your next course of action depends on how you’d like to set up and authorise the synchronisation.
Return to your first PC (if you’ve closed the share box there, click the Share button to the right of your synchronised folder on the Sync Home panel) and look at your options. You can share a folder with either read-only or read-and-write access (see screenshot left). If you’re only sharing files between your own devices, click ‘Read & Write’, and you’ll be able to edit the originals anywhere.
You also have options to require approval of new peers (devices), set the link to expire automatically, and limit the number of times it can be used. If you’re setting up synchronisation only across
your devices, you can safely disable the first of these options, but it’s worth leaving the other two as they are. That way, should someone come across the link in the future, it will no longer work.
Click either Email, if you want to send a copy of the share link to yourself, or Copy if you want to paste it into an alternative communication tool. However you send it to your other computer, click it and, in the browser window that opens, click ‘I already have Sync’, followed by Open Resilio Sync (see screenshot below left).
Resilio doesn’t force you to store a folder’s contents in identical locations on each of your devices, so it will now ask you where you’d like to place the synchronised files on your computer. If you’re happy with its suggestion, click Connect. Otherwise, click Change (see screenshot below) and navigate to the folder you’d prefer to use, then click Select Folder. Resilio will download a copy of your synchronised files from their original location.
If you share your files with more computers, they will each obtain (and maintain) their own copy of the synchronised files. In future, though, they’ll get updates from others on the same synchronised network. That way, if the computer that created one of the files you want to use is switched off, it should
still be available on any of the others, just as it would be if it were stored online.
To open a folder that originates on another machine, simply click it within the Sync Home window (see screenshot above) and it will open in File Explorer. Of course, if you’ve granted read and write access to other machines, the concept of just one computer ‘owning’ it is somewhat muddied: it exists everywhere, and belongs to every peer in your network, with each one having as much right as any of the others to create new files within it and edit those that already exist.
Sync on your phone and 4 tablet
The Resilio Sync mobile app is free, and available on both IOS/IPADOS ( www.snipca.com/33486) and Android ( www.snipca.com/33487).
Setting it up to synchronise with your PC is simple: install and launch the app, swipe through the screens, then specify a name for your phone and decide whether you’re happy for it to use mobile data. Finally, tap Done.
Tap the ‘+’ at the top of the screen, followed by ‘Scan QR code’ and allow the app to access your camera. On your PC, click the Share button beside one of the folders you’ve already set up for synchronisation and switch to the ‘QR code’ tab.
Now point your phone’s camera at the on-screen graphic and the app will detect the shared folder. Tap Yes to confirm that you want to add it to your phone or tablet and it will immediately retrieve a list of files in the synchronised folder.
What it doesn’t do is retrieve the files themselves – at least not until you need to tap one. A tick will then appear next to these files, as shown in the screenshot above right. This shouldn’t be a problem
if you have several PCS and laptops synchronised and can guarantee that at least one of them will be turned on at all times – your phone/tablet will always be able to download a copy of the file it needs from somewhere on the network.
However, if you prefer to switch off your machines, or you have only one PC, which might be out of reach if it loses its network connection, make sure you download files you might need before leaving your Wi-fi network.
Share files with other 5 people
Although we’ve focused on using Resilio Sync to share folders between your own devices, there’s no reason why you have to stop there. You can share links to your folders with friends, and they can share theirs with you in return.
This would, for example, allow family members to synchronise their documents only between their own personal computers, but their photos with each other using the same program.
Each person would see all of the synchronised folders, whether their own or shared by someone else, side by side
within the same Sync Home window.
However, you can also use Resilio to share individual files if you don’t want to reveal a complete folder.
Open a File Explorer window and navigate to the folder containing the file you want to share. Right-click the file and pick ‘Share with Resilio Sync’ (see screenshot below).
A link to the file will be copied to the clipboard. Either paste this into an email or instant message, or click the Windows notification that pops up at the edge of the screen for Resilio’s built-in sharing options, including the Email and Copy buttons you saw earlier when syncing a folder.