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The AeroFS Private Cloud

blog.aerofs.com

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Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#21

Post by mindslight »

nostromo wrote: post #17
HorizonXP wrote: post #5

So I'm actually setting up a private cloud for my company right now. It's a company of 1, so the requirements are quite extensive. :-P I'm building a FreeNAS server with 6x3TB hard drives in a RAID-Z2 config. My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups, but to also use AeroFS as my file sync mechanism when I'm both in the office and on the road. Hopefully it works out smoothly. I'll have to figure o…

Why not just use BTSync for syncing? I use it for this purpose and it's fantastic. For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.

Why not use Unison? It only does pairwise synchronization, but is Free software and extremely mature.

(sigh, it seems the tech community has become blind to anything that isn't heavily blogvertised.)

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#22

Post by pedrocr »

[deleted] wrote: post #16
pedrocr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups Note that this is completely unreliable. Time Machine isn't built to work over the network. The network support is badly hacked together and will destroy your backups on network faults. They basically treat the network volume as a block device that gets corrupted when the connection fails. Using it over wifi makes this painfully obvious.

[deleted]

I'm positive about Time Machine over AFP. iSCSI was indeed pointed out as a potential avenue with less issues, but if I recall didn't really fix it completely. If you're running wired+iSCSI you're probably much less prone to this. Try and yank some network cables during backup and see how it handles it.

I ran into more issues than most because the particular AP I have at home doesn't work well with the macbook air I was trying to backup and resulted in a lot of disconnects. So it was a bit of a stress test but the issue is real and well documented. You can find instructions all over the web on how to fsck sparsebundles to try and get back your backups[1].

This is particularly annoying because Time Machine is supposed to be a user friendly version of versioned backups like you can do with rsync+hardlinks. I have a script to do that for me on my personal linux machine and would love to be able to deploy TimeMachine+AFP for the rest of the family. Unfortunately apple decided it really needed to have hard-linked directories for just this case and so decided that the way to do that over the network was to have a single binary blob with a HFS image on the server instead of the proper files in the filesystem (filesystems don't usually support hard linked directories, HFS was hacked to do it). That way you not only lose direct access to the individual files on the server you also lose the whole backups when there's disk corruption...

I should probably have a look again to see if iSCSI is a viable solution to this.

[1] http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machin...

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#23

Post by nostromo »

magic5227 wrote: post #6

Has anyone compared the reliability of this to Bittorrent's solution? I tried Aero a while ago and found it to be very buggy then. Are there any major differences between the two? http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

We are a small company and are very happy with BTSync.

However, if you want tight admin control, you may have some issues. For example: If an employee leaves, we're not sure how to revoke privileges for them once they have access to the folder.

So, I recommend very small companies use BTSync since it's easy and free. But if you're a larger company, you have probably outgrown BTSync and should get something like AeroFS.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#24

Post by kayoone »

HorizonXP wrote: post #18
thematt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. I've been using Bittorrent Sync for awhile now and absolutely love it. It's super fast and I've never had any inconsistencies in syncing. The closed-source nature of it is not ideal, but if that's a concern you're no better off with AeroFS or Dropbox.

Nor are you better off with Bittorrent Sync. It's closed-source as well. That could change of course.

Thats exactly what he said.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#25

Post by chrisrogers »

mindslight wrote: post #21
nostromo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use BTSync for syncing? I use it for this purpose and it's fantastic. For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.

Why not use Unison? It only does pairwise synchronization, but is Free software and extremely mature. (sigh, it seems the tech community has become blind to anything that isn't heavily blogvertised.)

Unison requires a bit more administrative work to set up and maintain than BTSync, in my experience. People really like the Dropbox experience.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#26

Post by kika »

pedrocr wrote: post #22
[deleted] wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I'm positive about Time Machine over AFP. iSCSI was indeed pointed out as a potential avenue with less issues, but if I recall didn't really fix it completely. If you're running wired+iSCSI you're probably much less prone to this. Try and yank some network cables during backup and see how it handles it. I ran into more issues than most because the particular AP I have at home doesn't work well with the macbook air I…

I can confirm that. I've lost a TM backup recently made over the (wired) network. The cable failed, backup in progress hung, TM volume remained locked until I reboot, I rebooted and sparsebundle got screwed up. TM started it all over again.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#27

Post by kika »

HorizonXP wrote: post #20
nostromo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use BTSync for syncing? I use it for this purpose and it's fantastic. For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.

I do like BTSync and considered it, but I'm not the biggest fan of the idea that my data is stored on everyone's computer. AeroFS allows me some semblance of control, and as I grow, it will allow me to add users easily. I won't know until I try it though, I could just as easily change my mind and use BTSync.

BTSync could be installed everywhere, but it only syncs between the folders with the same key. So if only your computers have your key(s) then only they would have contents of your folder(s).

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#28

Post by pedrocr »

kika wrote: post #26
pedrocr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm positive about Time Machine over AFP. iSCSI was indeed pointed out as a potential avenue with less issues, but if I recall didn't really fix it completely. If you're running wired+iSCSI you're probably much less prone to this. Try and yank some network cables during backup and see how it handles it. I ran into more issues than most because the particular AP I have at home doesn't work well with the macbook air I…

I can confirm that. I've lost a TM backup recently made over the (wired) network. The cable failed, backup in progress hung, TM volume remained locked until I reboot, I rebooted and sparsebundle got screwed up. TM started it all over again.

Check the link in my post. If you still have the sparsebundle you can probably recover it with an fsck.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#29

Post by kika »

pedrocr wrote: post #28
kika wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that. I've lost a TM backup recently made over the (wired) network. The cable failed, backup in progress hung, TM volume remained locked until I reboot, I rebooted and sparsebundle got screwed up. TM started it all over again.

Check the link in my post. If you still have the sparsebundle you can probably recover it with an fsck.

Well, luckily I didn't _need_ this backup, so I just deleted the bundle and started over.

Re: The AeroFS Private Cloud

#30

Post by rdl »

Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).
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