Former Pirate Bay Cyberlocker ‘Bayfiles’ Makes a ‘Comeback’

In 2011, Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde launched Bayfiles, a new file-sharing venture.

Instead of relying on torrents, which had previously made TPB a huge success, Bayfiles allowed users to upload and download large files directly.

With its no-nonsense sharing approach, the site swiftly accumulated a steady user base. However, that ended when the site was abruptly pulled offline, following a raid in 2014. Bayfiles probably wasn’t the primary target, but the site never returned.

While most users had given up on Bayfiles, an anonymous group of ‘privacy-oriented’ people played with the idea of relaunching it. They missed the old Bayfiles and thought that it would be great to have it make a comeback. This idea became reality this week.

The new Bayfiles team informs TorrentFreak that it bought the domains and logotype from TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO. The price was a symbolic fee, covering a few years of domain registrations and a couple of beers for good measure.

Fast forward a few weeks and Bayfiles is back in action. The team says that it noticed a decrease in simple “one-click” file hosts in recent years, and hopes that Bayfiles will fill this gap.

All the old data are gone so the site and its potential users will have to start from scratch. There is no requirement to register an account and with a lenient retention policy, no download throttling, and an upload limit of 10GB per file, there are few restrictions.

The site is free to use by anyone, but those who create an account can use it to keep track of their files. The accounts come with 1TB storage. This is free for the first 30 days and after that it’s between 3.5 and 5 euro per month, depending on the length of the subscription.

“Registering an account is, of course, optional and only for you to keep track of your own files, and there are no download caps or speed limits for anonymous users,” the new Bayfiles team tells us.

“Ads tend to be annoying and that doesn’t rhyme with our principles of having a clean site, so we will try our best to keep the service afloat through the subscription model.”

The payments are all handled in cryptocurrencies. This is something the Bayfiles team learned from the past, as many payment processors have previously banned the site.

The goal is to make sharing as fast and easy as possible, and the built-in video and audio players certainly help with this. “Most browsers are capable of playing MP4, MP3, etc so we thought ‘why not’. If your browser supports it, it will play,” the Bayfiles team says.

Streaming a file from Bayfiles

Aside from a few small changes, Bayfiles hopes to keep its old vibe alive.

“The fast download speeds combined with the ‘Bay attitude’ Bayfiles got from the founders of TPB. I guess we share the same stance and attitude since we are from the same era when TPB got started.

“The site will continue with the values it had prior to the raid in 2014, and we’ll add features and improve the service as we collect feedback from our users,” the Bayfiles team notes.

While Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij is not involved in the new project, he doesn’t mind seeing the Bayfiles domain names being put to good use after a three-year ‘break.’

“The domain names were just gathering dust in my domain collection. Now people can at least use it for sharing,” Neij tells us.

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