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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently mounting two rPi boards to two external hard drives. I'll leave one at home and one at work and run BitTorrent Sync on them to create my own little distributed / decentralized Dropbox. Would a blog post when I'm done be interesting?

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Shameless plug: I just did exactly this over the weekend and wrote about how well it works here: http://blog.travisthieman.com/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-...

Short version: BTSync is awesome, ownCloud makes the Pi struggle pretty hard

Great! Would doing something like using BTSync across multiple nodes as usual be fine, then only run opencloud on a single machine (just for the web interface)?

Yeah, that would work just fine. The only issue is that you want the ownCloud machine to have local copies of the data, so either you'd want it in the cloud (super expensive) or you'd want your own beefier-than-a-Pi machine to serve as an ownCloud-running node.

By the way, if you're looking at ownCloud check out Seafile as well. After hearing about ownCloud's performance issues I decided to try Seafile instead and I've had a very positive experience. I'm running it on a VPS in the cloud but they have a release compiled for the Rasberry Pi as well. http://seafile.com/en/download/

Thanks! I saw some references to it scattered about but was sort of turned off by the team-centric presentation. Are you just using it for your own personal stuff?

Yeah, I'm mainly just using it for a personal backup/synchronization and it works great for that. The team stuff is nice to have available too though. It was trivial to set up a shared folder between myself and my girlfriend.

I can't imagine why syncing files would consume 800 ARM-Mhz. Maybe their is contention between the host OS and the Secure OS.

For reference, I was seeing about 80% CPU load from btsync and 20% from the driver talking to my hard drives.

I would love a combination Raspberry Pi/hard drive enclosure. This way you could tote the two around in one handy container. I'm thinking 3D printing companies could handle this "easily" -- at least for prototype??

I would really like to have my Pi powered by the same power supply as the hard drive. I could probably hack it together myself, but out of the box would be nice.

I've been meaning to setup BTSync on all my devices, including the raspberry pi I haven't hacked with in awhile.

I wish 1password worked with btsync

Why not just set up ownCloud?

I'll be considering other software like that once it's set up. Using BTSync works with my current workflow so that's what I'm shooting for in v1

How well does BTSync work?

I've been really happy sofar. I haven't finished this project build quite yet but I've been using BTSync installed on my nexus 4 auto-syncing my camera folder to my laptop so every time I take a picture I get a notification saying that a new JPG has been added to the folder (and auto downloads obviously).

In this blog post it sounds like I'll be writing, I'll report on sync speeds using 3 nodes and things like that.

Haven't had an issue with it thus far. It's very good on iOS, and running on a few different devices I've got lying around.

Absolutely!

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