Features¶

Gateway and Web UI¶

• Gateway to share normal HTTP/S links with other users.
• Simple UI provided to execute the typical tasks without the need of a command line.
• User and right management included.

Comparison with other tools¶

When showing brig (or any other software in general) to someone the first question is usually something like »But isn’t there already X?« and sometimes even »Why don’t you just contribute to other projects?«. This section tries to find an answer to both questions. The answer will obviously be biased, so take it with a fair grain of salt.

Yes, there is other software in this world. But this is always a matter of trade offs the author of each individual package has chosen. One application might not run on your platform, the next might not be secure enough for your needs, the other one is proprietary or has something else that does not fit your liking. I won’t go into an exhaustive list of competitors, but more highlight the things that are special in brig and cannot be done easily in other systems.

I said »competitors« earlier, which is a silly term, since I don’t see this as a competition. For me it’s more about giving the user a choice and improving by adapting good ideas from other implementations. Let’s list a few of those »competitors« to give you an impression about the place of brig in the world:

• Syncthing: Probably conceptually the nearest relative. Also a peer-to-peer based filesystem, but with its own protocol. Focus seems to be on ease-of-use and general high quality usability. Does not have strong versioning. Excellent tool and battle tested.
• Resilio: Proprietary solution based on BitTorrent. Seems to focus on performance and enterprise level resilience. Being proprietary is a show stopper for me.
• Perkeep: Not focused on files, but on storing personal »objects«. Would be probably more interesting as a backend for brig.
• Upspin: A global name system that glues together filesystems and other data storage. Could be also a backend for brig and is not directly targeted to end users.
• Bazil: Basically brig minus IPFS. While apparently discontinued it seems to have a great deal of common features with brig. The same author also maintains the FUSE bindings of FUSE and his writeups helped me writing the FUSE implementation of brig. Thank you very much for your work @tv42!
• Git LFS: The large file storage extension to git. Similar to brig’s pinning in the sense that large files are replaced with links that will be fetched from a LFS server.
• git annex: Extension to git that tracks filenames and metadata instead of file content. Has a great deal of powerful features but can be a bit intimidating to the end users since it does not seem to focus much on usability. Features like the number of minimum copies a file must have before you can delete it are still on brig’s roadmap.

There are probably more. Some of these inspired quite a bit how brig looks today. So what are the unique features of brig that you would not get easily with other tools?

• Pinning: The fact that not all data needs to be on the same machine as the brig daemon opens up interesting possibilities. Also the ability of repinning is something I did not see in other tools.
• Strong versioning of big files: High level versioning that is comparable to git, but simplified and meant for whole-file version control (and not for individual diffs).

Of course there are drawbacks. Choosing brig currently means using software that is not in widespread use. It did not go through a security audit. It is by far not as efficient as other tools in all use cases. But many of the current hurdles are solvable and it’s just a matter of time.

The best advice I can give you: Try it out and see if it fits your use case. If it doesn’t I’m happy to hear from you and wish you all the best with another tool.