So in my constant search for the ideal way to share your own personal files privately, I'm now exploring the torrent options. If you guys here have followed my threads in the past, you'll have seen me struggle with VPN, ftp, ftps, sftp, http, https, basically any protocol that can be used to share files. The goal is essentially this:
--Share my desktop files so I can download them from any remote computer
--No storage limitations (this bars any cloud services...I want no storage restrictions. If I have 5 TB that shouldn't be a problem at all.)
--No cloud services...no middle men.
Torrent seems to be the best way to share files right now, despite the controversial nature of it. What's good about it is that it's very scalable, reliable, and efficient. it can handle unstable connections very easily, which most of the other protocols suck at. Plus, it's popular and mature.
Now, torrents are primarily used as a group sharing tool. But can it be used as a personal, private file-access tool? For it to work well, I would need some kind of software that can "manage" my files and torrents. It would need to be able to automatically create a bunch of torrents and deal with file modifications and changes, etc.
I don't think something like this exists, but I think it would be a really cool tool for the community here to work on. Here are some features that I think would make it badass:
--Automatic torrent creation. It would be cool if the torrent manager can select a folder (and subfolders) and automatically create a torrent for each of the files there. Also, if it could register the trackers and all that to get the torrent up and running with as much automation as possible. Then, with the click of a button, all your files could be shared.
--These files and folders are going to change. So it would be cool if the manager can kind of keep track of all that: delete torrents that no longer exists, modify ones with changed file contents, etc.
--Being torrents, the more seeders the better. But since these are your personal files, having a lot of seeders is scary. But we normally have more than one location where we work or hang out. You can setup a NAS or standalone PC at a few locations and keep copies of your files there, and the torrent speeds would go up with each additional location, since that bandwidth can be used. It's a very cool feature of torrents that the bandwidth can be increased in this way.
So this is something i keep thinking about. I'd like to get to a point where we can easily access all our files from anywhere without using any cloud services or old, unstable connections like VPN or ftp.
