There are lots of occasions where you might want to share files with other computers. Perhaps you have a home PC and a laptop and you have some work documents you would like to keep in sync. Maybe you have some photos you would like to share with your partner's computer but don't want to go through the hassle of checking which photos they have already got whenever you take new pictures.

There are a number of products already available that will allow you to keep folders in sync to satisfy some of these requirements. So, why was broolz developed? 

broolz was initially developed as the sort of file sharing product that we, the developers, wanted. Yes, it is true that file sharing products already exist and some of them are quite good. But none of them did (or do) file sharing the right way, and their flaws led us to develop something new. The current crop of mainstream file sharing products all behave in roughly the same way - you send your data to their servers to look after and then pull that data down onto another computer. Any changed files go the same way. The flaws we see with this approach are many, but the main ones are:

1. Your data is held by some third party. Yes, sometimes it is encrypted, but they hold the keys too. A company may be broadly trustworthy, but a company is staffed by individuals, and it only takes one rogue to potentially compromise your data. Examples of this are, unfortunately, numerous (a good example happened very recently when staff at T-mobile sold customer data to competitors, but there are many others). We would not trust our sensitive data with an anonymous third party. Why should you have to?
2. International law is such that when data resides in a country it is subject to the laws of that country. Of course, we are not suggesting you would ever share anything that is illegal in any country, but this fact does give us an uneasy feeling. Most countries law enforcement agencies have the authority to view any data held on their country's servers. You can be fairly certain that if the FBI came knocking, these companies would very quickly hand over your data.
3. Typically you want to share files with others close by. Maybe you have family photos that you want to be kept on two home computers, or you are working on some documents with others in your office. Why would you want to send those files via a different continent when their destination is just a few feet away? If the data is large, have you considered how long it would take to send over the internet? What about your ISP restrictions?

So the current crop of file sharing products is out. What about the new breed of peer to peer (p2p) solutions? These use seed files (called torrents) to give your computer knowledge about where the files you want are located so that 

you can download them. The problem there is that you cannot easily pick who you wish to download from or who you send the file to. Anyone might have access to that data, and that is no good with your family photos or company documents. 

Enter broolz.

broolz was developed to overcome these limitations. Believe me - we have better things to do than reinvent the wheel and go head to head with the likes of Microsoft and Apple: that would be suicide. We designed broolz to perform file sharing without the massive overhead of sending files around the world, chewing up your bandwidth, having your data sitting on some server somewhere you have no control or jurisdiction over whilst, at the same time avoiding the anonymity and lack of control that traditional p2p offers. Using broolz, you define who sees the files you own and you define who is allowed to send you files. When you share, the data goes directly to the computers you allow - and no others. You are in control!

Sounds simple.

Turns out, it isn't. Building the product has been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. We wanted to make the things as easy to use as possible whilst providing maximum functionality in a package that looked good. Well, that didn't sound so difficult to achieve when we were in the design phases of the product, but because the initial users of the product were us, the developers, we kept adding to the design (the design phase went on a long time) to ensure the product was the best it could be. When we finally came to write the product it took a lot of very clear thinking to ensure that it really did fulfill our goals.

Ok, that is a round about way of saying that developing broolz was really, really hard (which is probably why this sort of product currently doesn't exist). But now we have done it and you can now see the fruits of our labour. 

Using broolz::share you can

share files with friends
allow friends to change your files – but only if you want them to
recover any version of the file before it was changed

But (and here is the really powerful bit) the files you share stay within your control at all times. You decide who get which files. You decide who changes which files. Your files do not have to be held on Big Brother's servers! This means

no bandwith usage when you sync
no problems with your data being subject to other countries laws
no worries over who might access you data without your permission
no incredibly slow transfers as your data is sent through the internet

broolz::share gives you complete control over the way you share your data.

And there is more to come. Much, much more.

Your Cloud Your Way!

-The broolz team