Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'd like to try it as well if any of your could spare an invite please?
I'd also love to try it - if anyone has an extra invite, mind sending one to hn@mikehearn.net?
I'd love an invite too... stumpfie@hotmail.de
AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
91–100 of 123 posts
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#92I wonder if it uses Tahoe-LAFS behind the scenes?
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#93If AeroFS is a big honkin' Java background app, I worry, because I worry about the Java ecosystem itself. Who knows how long Oracle will keep it updated? Will new versions of Java break the AeroFS daemon? And I just hate everything Java (bias showing there).
(I suppose DropBox has the same issue with Python to some extent, but at least Python can be fully embedded in an executable and bypass the system environment questions.)
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#94AeroFS looks like an interesting service, I remember reading the earlier entry about them and their blog (i think it was on posterous at the time). It reminded me of two projects -- Wuala which allowed seemless syncing between machines, as well as donating storage to gain the benefit of "cloud storage" for your files. They eventually went the route of offering storage space and got bought by Lacie. The second is much…
The second is much older (mid/earlyish 90s) that had the same p2p based donate space on your drive and fragments of your files will be stored on other connected machines.
I think you are thinking of MojoNation, which died and forked off several sub-projects/companies based on its original codebase: Allmydata was just like Wuala but five or six years earlier that never gained any traction and now lives on in the Tahoe-LAFS project, and BitTorrent (which you have probably heard of...)
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Sorry, didn't look hard enough then, thanks :)
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#96So, what's the business model? You pay for "cloudy" backup space, but otherwise it's free?
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#97Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#98I 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)?
My sibling commenter is giving me too much credit - I started before git came along, so it was either CVS or SVN. I wanted to be able to kill directories directly from the repository, so CVS it was.
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#99This looks very interesting, but the it's a bit difficult to figure out what it actually is from the website. My impression is that it's like a more featureful take on Unison ("two-way rsync" iirc) with a central server to facilitate NAT traversal. I suppose they probably haven't figured out their eventual pricing model, but I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month just for coordinating NAT traversal, papering over dyna…
it looks like they ultimately will charge for cloud backup (just like dropbox). As you note, the incremental cost of user is zero, so they don't incur a cost by distributing lots of client applications (unlike dropbox, who incurs costs for free customers that use the <2GB plan). it will be interesting to see if dropbox responds. I like the model aerofs proposes. I'm a dropbox user but I use it entirely for the file s…
I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the lack of a web interface. I've been using AeroFS and Dropbox heavily but haven't felt that I'm at the point where I could give either one up completely. Dropbox is too costly for syncing everything on my drives and I'd prefer not to have sensitive documents on someone else's server.
But, AeroFS requires a client installation and sync to get any access. I've used the Dropbox web interface and iPhone app numerous times to look up a file or reference when I was away from the office. Sure, I could set up a web interface on my desktop as an alternative, but that's not end-user simple. It's also a problem in that, at least on OSX, changes made my system-level processes (such as file sharing) don't always register as modification in the File System Event Database, and thus don't get synced.
Re: AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
#100I see they have a Linux version. Is it Open Source?
The biggest problem I have with centralized servers in the first place is that I don't trust my data with them. If it was decentralized and open source, that's an app I could see myself using. Closed source = no good for privacy.
I think that AeroFS only uses central servers to identify the IP addresses of participating hosts and negotiate a connection. AFAIK, the actual data flows directly peer to peer. So, even a malicious employee or government snoop would only know the IP of swarm participants. Presumably you'd still need to intercept and crack any encryption between nodes.