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AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

aerofs.com

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Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#71

Post by plusbryan »

atourgates wrote: post #60

I can't figure out if at allows seeding backups. E.g. - backing up your first massive backup locally using an external drive, then moving it physically offsite and beginning the sync online. That seems like a fantastic feature to me. That way, instead of having - say - a photo library on each of my laptops - I can have a single photo library at a remote location on an external hard drive that's constantly synched wit…

I believe so. My photos on two drives were about 3 months out of sync and and it seemed to only sync those that were missing.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#72

Post by yurisagalov »

Good morning everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of AeroFS. I'll be here the rest of the day answering questions as they come up, if anyone has them. Otherwise, feel free to either chat with me on the website, and/or through support@aerofs.com :-)

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#73

Post by roel_v »

yurisagalov wrote: post #72

Good morning everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of AeroFS. I'll be here the rest of the day answering questions as they come up, if anyone has them. Otherwise, feel free to either chat with me on the website, and/or through support@aerofs.com :-)

I got an invite yesterday and I'm trying it out, one thing you could make more clear on the website is for what purposes it does connect to the central server. I had to enter a username/password so it must be doing some communication with your servers, no? Otherwise, how does it find other computers that are connected to the account? And if your service goes away, would I be unable to add new machines to my 'sync network'?

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#74

Post by yurisagalov »

plusbryan wrote: post #61
DEinspanjer wrote: post #43

Anyone know if it supports lazy syncing? i.e. if I have a big beefy server with a couple hundred gigs of media, and I would like to be able to access individual files occasionally from my small laptop, am I forced to sync everything over because the folder is shared?

AFAIK, right now, this is not supported. You can have multiple shares/folders though, so it's closer to this than say, Dropbox.

Bryan is right. Right now we support selectively syncing independent shares. So if you had a "music" library, and a "workgroup" library, you could sync either the music library, or the workgroup library, or both (or neither), but that's as fine granularity as we allow today.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#75

Post by yurisagalov »

roel_v wrote: post #73
yurisagalov wrote: post #72

Good morning everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of AeroFS. I'll be here the rest of the day answering questions as they come up, if anyone has them. Otherwise, feel free to either chat with me on the website, and/or through support@aerofs.com :-)

I got an invite yesterday and I'm trying it out, one thing you could make more clear on the website is for what purposes it does connect to the central server. I had to enter a username/password so it must be doing some communication with your servers, no? Otherwise, how does it find other computers that are connected to the account? And if your service goes away, would I be unable to add new machines to my 'sync net…

This actually used to be such a common question that we wrote a support article about it :) See http://ae.ro/jnqNyw for more info

(edit: wrong link before, my bad)

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#76

Post by yurisagalov »

plusbryan wrote: post #70

AeroFS isn't as refined as Dropbox, but the flexibility of cross-computer sync makes it pretty ideal for large media storage. I have almost 200GB of photos, and dropbox really wasn't an option for that. They release updates to the product every few weeks, so it's getting better. Gripes: 1- It's a lot chattier than dropbox. This could be a tradeoff for being a distributed protocol, but it's something that dropbox seem…

Hey Bryan, Your gripes haven't fallen on deaf ears :) The chatty protocol feedback we've heard a few times, and we're doing our best to optimize it. The Lion issues we'll investigate ASAP.

As for #3, That's actually a highly requested feature (see http://ae.ro/iUi6OZ), so it's pretty high on our to do list

#4. We've thought about this for a while, not really sure yet how we will implement it though.

#5. Working on that, as well, no ETA yet though :)

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#77

Post by Splines »

kenjackson wrote: post #57

This sounds very similar to Microsoft's LiveMesh. Besides that fact that it's not Microsoft, what are the big differences in functionality or usability (or is it totally different)?

This is exactly what I use Live Mesh for. I sync 10s of gigs of photos between remote PCs with it.

The only thing I don't like about Live Mesh is that it's very difficult to tell what it's transferring and how long it's taking. It works, but I wouldn't be able to tell you "it'll be another 20 minutes before it's done".

How does AeroFS stack up here?

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#79

Post by StavrosK »

buro9 wrote: post #25
pilif wrote: post #10

I'm using this for about 6 months now. It works exactly like Dropbox, but it doesn't store any data on a central server, so I can use it even for my more sensitive files like my ssh private key. I have a server at home on which AeroFS is running, so my data generally is available. And if my internet at home is down, usually there's another machine where it's running. As it's syncing and keeping the local copy, the mo…

I've got one of these NAS devices at home that is always on: http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=167 I'd love to see installers made for a few of the NAS devices on the market for this. It would solve the "must have another computer on" thing really well.

I've been using AeroFS in headless mode on my NAS as well, and it's worked fine so far (the headless mode itself, I think there were a few bugs in AeroFS).

I'll try it again now, however. If they nail the fundamentals down, it'll replace Dropbox for me.

EDIT: Or do you mean custom NAS OSes? Mine just runs Ubuntu.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#80

Post by StavrosK »

yurisagalov wrote: post #76
plusbryan wrote: post #70

AeroFS isn't as refined as Dropbox, but the flexibility of cross-computer sync makes it pretty ideal for large media storage. I have almost 200GB of photos, and dropbox really wasn't an option for that. They release updates to the product every few weeks, so it's getting better. Gripes: 1- It's a lot chattier than dropbox. This could be a tradeoff for being a distributed protocol, but it's something that dropbox seem…

Hey Bryan, Your gripes haven't fallen on deaf ears :) The chatty protocol feedback we've heard a few times, and we're doing our best to optimize it. The Lion issues we'll investigate ASAP. As for #3, That's actually a highly requested feature (see http://ae.ro/iUi6OZ ), so it's pretty high on our to do list #4. We've thought about this for a while, not really sure yet how we will implement it though. #5. Working on t…

Regarding #3 (and probably #4), make sure they don't clutter your default UI (maybe hide them behind a small button in preferences). There's a reason why Dropbox is so popular, and it's because it's just a folder that syncs. You might want to preserve that simplicity as much as you can in AeroFS too.
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