BitTorrent Sync, the application that lets you sync files securely using the company’s distributed technology, has reached beta. Sync was built for practical reasons first, according to Brett Nishi, Senior Director at BitTorrent. “An engineer wanted a simple way to share photos with his mother and built the app at one of our company ‘hackathons,'” says Nishi. Thus BitTorrent Sync was born.

The app first appeared at the beginning of the year as a closed alpha and then a public alpha in April of this year. Now under three months later, the company has launched Sync in beta.

“Since the alpha, users have transferred over 8 petabytes of data”

To go along with today’s updates to the BitTorrent desktop clients, there’s a brand new Android app to help users sync files to their mobile devices. An Android app has been a top request of BitTorrent’s Alpha testers, according to Christian Averill, Director of Communications at BitTorrent. “The community really got involved and we got a lot of great feedback,” says Averill. “We have 25 million Android installs of our products on Android so it’s a great platform to develop for.”

The Android app will run on devices with Android 2.2 or later, which means just about every modern Android device is covered. Users can look forward to backing up photos, videos, and other file to and from their Android device. There’s currently no iOS version but that’s in the works, according to BitTorrent.

Desktop users can look forward to the new SyncArchive feature, which is BitTorrent Sync’s implementation of versioning. This means you can jump back to an older document if you realized you removed something important. This feature will be great for writers and photographers who work with tons of different file versions. Versioning will time stamp files so users can manually go in an change things around. There’s currently no interface like Apple’s Time Machine to roll back changes.

Since the uncovering of the NSA’s spying program, PRISM, there has been a focus on privacy and security in the tech industry. BitTorrent Sync provides a secure method of transferring files with 256 bit AES encryption between devices. Sync also doesn’t rely on a company’s “cloud” storage, which could be subject to government snooping. With Sync, you create your own personal cloud from your own devices.

“We have great respect for user privacy. We do gather basic info from users about how much data they’ve transferred and what client they’re using but we have no information about what users are transferring,” says Nishi. “Sometimes I wish we did just for statistics,” he says laughing.

“We’ll move as quickly as we can. We’ll go to a full release when it’s stable.”

As for the timeline for a gold release for BitTorrent Sync, nothing has been planned. “We’ll move as quickly as we can. We’ll go to a full release when it’s stable,” says Averill.

If you want to give BitTorrent Sync a try, check out the download links below.