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AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

aerofs.com

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#41
post #7

I've been using the beta for several months now and it has worked great across a variety of Windows and Mac machines. For things like music and photos where I have 40+GB of accumulated bits it feels a better option than a straight cloud based system like DropBox or JungleDisk (which I also use, but for a smaller amount of stuff). I have a number of machines with many GB of spare disk space, so rather than paying mont…

>Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case. On a LAN, I don't really see the advantages over something like FreeFileSync, which is GPL'd. Over the 'net, locating the machine and performing NAT traversal can be useful, though, especially for people behind ISP NAT.

The advantage is that you can seamlessly move between LAN and WAN, and your sync speed will seamlessly move with you.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#42
post #7

I've been using the beta for several months now and it has worked great across a variety of Windows and Mac machines. For things like music and photos where I have 40+GB of accumulated bits it feels a better option than a straight cloud based system like DropBox or JungleDisk (which I also use, but for a smaller amount of stuff). I have a number of machines with many GB of spare disk space, so rather than paying mont…

>Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case. On a LAN, I don't really see the advantages over something like FreeFileSync, which is GPL'd. Over the 'net, locating the machine and performing NAT traversal can be useful, though, especially for people behind ISP NAT.

I've visited FreeFileSync site on SF and didn't get it. Does FFS support non-interactive ("daemon") mode, where it runs in background, monitors filesystem for changes (using inotify or similar mechanism) and propagates them to one or several remote systems. (I've highlighted the key points.)

AeroFS and Dropbox are not as simple as inotifywatch+rsync. They don't only offer synchronization, but replication and version control.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#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?

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#44
I guess I'm just old school, but my solution to this problem has been a 250 GB external drive + CVS for all my files. I've been doing it for years and it works great. Every time I leave a machine, it's just 'cvs commit -m "Leaving home/work/library/Starbucks"'. Once you get past the perverse feeling of checking your music library into CVS, it works fine.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#45

I guess I'm just old school, but my solution to this problem has been a 250 GB external drive + CVS for all my files. I've been doing it for years and it works great. Every time I leave a machine, it's just 'cvs commit -m "Leaving home/work/library/Starbucks"'. Once you get past the perverse feeling of checking your music library into CVS, it works fine.

I'm curious; why CVS instead of something nicer like git (or mercurial, which has good windows support)?

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#46
post #3

Beautiful homepage but there is an extra word in the paragraph "Unlimited Storage": "AeroFS lets you can sync all the data" Also I don't fully understand the product from just the first page. Who is your target audience?

The "unlimited storage" thing threw me. If I understand it correctly, it's limited by the free storage I have to use. "Your computer quite possibly has hundreds of gigabytes of space..." actually, no. Yes, I have a desktop with hundreds of GB free, but my laptop fights with me every day to keep 10-20 GB free. In that case, I think a network file share makes more sense. Aside from the confusion marketing, I like it. D…

It is unlimited, as they do not place a limit on it.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#47
One day, I will love AeroFS. But that day is not yet today: AeroFS does not preserve file modification times across clients, which kills it for me.

On the bright side, I finally got around to setting up Unison + cron to keep files in sync between my MacBook Air and my MacBook Pro, and it's working quite well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone facing a similar challenge.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#49

One day, I will love AeroFS. But that day is not yet today: AeroFS does not preserve file modification times across clients, which kills it for me. On the bright side, I finally got around to setting up Unison + cron to keep files in sync between my MacBook Air and my MacBook Pro, and it's working quite well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone facing a similar challenge.

I used Unison + cron for years, but recently I had to replace a machine, and discovered to my horror that my synced directory has grown beyond the size that Unison is capable of doing an initial synchronization of, EVEN if I precopy all the data. So AeroFS looks like it might be a killer app for me.

Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

#50
post #45

I guess I'm just old school, but my solution to this problem has been a 250 GB external drive + CVS for all my files. I've been doing it for years and it works great. Every time I leave a machine, it's just 'cvs commit -m "Leaving home/work/library/Starbucks"'. Once you get past the perverse feeling of checking your music library into CVS, it works fine.

I'm curious; why CVS instead of something nicer like git (or mercurial, which has good windows support)?

CVS doesn't store revisions locally so it takes a fraction of the space.
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