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 most current data will be on the machine I'm working on anyways.
The installation feels a bit "heavier" than dropbox which does a better job at staying out of my way, but the advantages of next to unlimited storage and no third-party server are huge for me.
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.
I used to build my own SqueezeBox Server for years from source, but after a while I just wanted it reasonably up to date, in a stable build, without the hassle. I'd hope that AeroFS would be packaged in the same way so it's not another thing on my list of things to maintain.
I just bought a Synology DS411j yesterday and I intended to run AeroFS on there. Unfortunately, AeroFS requires the JVM which I believe won't run on my NAS. (JamVM might with some hacking). Hopefully there'll be a solution soon because I really hoped I could setup my own Dropbox at home on my NAS.
For the love of god, never ever let your private keys leave the devices they were generated on. That defeats more or less one of the key features with key-based authentication, you cannot easily remove access to a lost key.
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 seemed to improve in over time as well.
2- Iffy compatibility with Lion: I often get "AeroFS is already running" messages.
3- They recently added the needed ability to change the location of the AeroFS Library, but I'd love to modify the location of each Share in the Library.
4- This is likely beyond the project's scope, but I'd love to be able to access my files without syncing in a pinch.
5- Better activity view: Dropbox's menu icon changes to indicate activity. I find this useful, so I can shut it off if my connection is slow. AeroFS's icon doesn't change, and to view activity, you need to open Preferences.
Positives:
1- Unrestricted size, great for large media libraries
2- Seems very fast, especially over LAN
3- I love how you can set up multiple shares - one for a workgroup, one for personal projects, and one for photos, and you can sync those among any computers you want.
4- It makes offsite backup effortless
5- Auto-updates are great
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 :)
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.
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 monthly storage fees for back up, I can just use this to replicate rarely changing content. 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."
AeroFS is not a 'copy diffs' tool, it's like dropbox - changes are propagated instantly and automatically, in all directions. Yes you can run a cron job syncing every 2 minutes or whatever but that still doesn't do syncs to many machines, it means you need to keep the machine with the cron job always on etc. So no, AeroFS/Dropbox are not like FreeFileSync or Cobian Backup or rsync or SyncToy or anything like that.
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.
I've never looked at (or heard of) FreeFileSync ... but AeroFS offers a very simple install and clean minimal UI for setting up the syncing.
I don't have to worry about which machine has which copy of which file, or even what the machine names are. I just login and can choose which 'Libraries' to sync with the local machine -- it handles finding the correct source, retrying when I close the laptop lid in the middle of something, etc, etc.
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 :-)
It might just be me, but the line "Perfect backup for your baby pictures :-)" on your features page struck me as a little... odd. It's the only smiley face on the site as far as I can tell, and the oddness of the lone smiley accompanied by talk of photos of children just seemed somehow creepy! Again, maybe it's just me :)
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'?
I was using this for awhile but the sync algorithm is retarded. It spent all of its time syncing gigs of meta data and saturating my upload rate. Also be prepared to make room for the 100mb+ process as it does not seem to care about memory efficiency.
I guess I'm still stuck with rsync and cronjobs until they work out the issues.
Indeed. Prepare to wait hours for newly added files to be synced, prepare for immense memory footprints, prepare for the worst conflict resolution you've ever seen.
Been using it for several months now, but would have to agree with this.
It often seems to churn away endlessly shoving meta data back and forth, and has periodically gotten confused about what files have been deleted or moved. Also had an issue where it kept duplicating some files. Toss a directory with a few thousand small files in it and it takes forever to sync. Not particularly light either.
They have a way to go to make it clean and elegant, but being able to seamlessly sync between Mac and Windows machines anywhere, without having to store in their cloud is nice.
Agreed -- I've exchanged many many emails with the developer to try to resolve my issues, but eventually gave up after trying for weeks to get it to sync a photos dir between my laptop and desktop (30,000 photos, 60GB).
Really hope they work it out one day, because I'd love the functionality for keeping dirs in sync w/o having to pay for the cloud portion; but right now its primary use case for me (dealing with dirs larger than I want stored in dropbox) appears to also be its Achilles' heel.
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.
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".
Did not try LiveMesh, but there is one notable difference: AeroFS has Linux support (which is why I did not bother with LiveMesh)
Also, LiveMesh looks and feels a bit alien GUI-wise, while AeroFS feels more native (although it's not quite there yet either, but gradually improving).
This 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 dynamic IPs and a web interface to set sync policy. For the most part, when my computers are sync'd peer-to-peer, I really don't need or want a copy of my data in the cloud -- my boxes _are_ the cloud. That means that their typical incremental cost per user would be practically zero.
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 syncing across three machines - I've only once used the web access to my files (i.e. only once used the cloud storage that aerofs would not provide).
If AeroFS has the same usability as dropbox, I would switch to get more storage for free.
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.
Indeed. Dropbox has validated the market and there probably is room for competitors because there are a lot of use-cases and power-user specific features that Dropbox doesn't cover and might not even want to.
I also don't understand from the website if this is a real filesystem (mounts in the namespace of the OS, works with any program etc) or o userspace utility, something like an explorer/finder plugin.
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. Definitely looks like a potentially nice, secure Dropbox replacement.
I see it more suitable for techies than normals. For instance I can't imagine explaining to my wife or sister that their files won't sync and they can lose something if the other machine went offline but when it came back they have already switched off the first one :(
Yes that one can be tough to explain, especially after the Dropbox "magic". Still it's a very valid use case that clearly highlights the tradeoff between "in the cloud, so always available, but at a monetary and potentially privacy price" and "not in the cloud, so as unrestricted free and secure as you make it, but needs a reachable peer".
It's not as fire-and-forget as Dropbox so I don't see everyone using AeroFS, but there are quite a bunch of non-techies that can get it and could be very interested in such features.
Is there a command-line client? I'd like to install that on a server via ssh and use it as a middle-man storage so I don't have to always have at least 2 computers running to sync.
I sure hope so. My home server has neither Xorg installed or a monitor attached. Very hard to tell what the actual product is, but I'd be surprised if they don't have a Linux daemon of some sort.
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.
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.
AeroFS 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 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.
The sharing and other similar features will be interesting to see how those are implemented.
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...)
Our whole company has been using AeroFS exclusively for our network drives, and it's worked extremely well! It's great because we can share files of any size, and it seamlessly updates between all machines.
Us as well. We have it installed on a central mac mini, and each client has a copy. It's a lot better than DropBox's current team solution, which forces you to dump your personal dropbox account.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I suppose.... but I'd be interested to hear their plans for when it's not a private beta. I would also be interested if the source code is visible to users (which is not the same thing as open source) . This transparency helps users know how safe their data is.
Echoing joelthelion, I wonder: is this just a service selling you access to Tahoe-LAFS? If so, wouldn't it make more sense to just install Tahoe yourself instead of paying them and worrying about whether their version of the code is less secure than the publicly audited version?
(Actually, even if not. Why would you pay someone to have access to your own files on your own computer?)
is this just a service selling you access to Tahoe-LAFS?
No. Tahoe-LAFS is very different (access is only over HTTP for a start)
Why would you pay someone to have access to your own files on your own computer?
Ignoring the whole free-to-use-on-your-computer-but-we'll-sell-you-cloud-backup model, there is always the old fashioned you-pay-us-for-the-software model.
love it, love it, love it. Please don't go out of business :) Related to going out of business - I'd like to start paying something monthly to support, please add that option
There's a nice big "Download Now" button that leads to a "Sign Up for an Invite" page that says "as soon as we can". That button causes the expectation that I would download something immediately so it's disappointing and discourteous when that's not the case.
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 with new photos, without the need to upload hundreds of GB in an initial seed.
Plus - of course - being able to access any of my photos from anywhere.
Crashplan offers something similar - but it's purely a backup solution - and doesn't make your files "cloud-like" accessible.
Theory is great, BUT if it isn't storing anything, then at least one device/computer with an up-to-date version of the folder must be online at all times. Is that correct? If not how does it sync without storing the data remotely?
See that seems like a bit of a downside to me, I like being able to pull down things from my Sparkleshare server onto my laptop when I'm out, but I don't have my computer on all the time (Infact, most of the time, when my laptop is on my computer is off and vice-versa). I still think it's a great idea but having some cloud storage is a definate plus.
Like I say, I use Sparkleshare instead of Dropbox and also have a Drobo for central storage, this isn't something I want to do because I can already do it, I was just pointing out it could be a problem for some people
I signed up for this ages ago. I tried it for a while, and then ditched it. IIRC it didn't have support for one of my operating systems at the time. My requirements have changed now, and it's been a while, so I just went to the website to download the app again, and I can't find it anywhere. The download link just goes to an invite page. I still have my credentials, but I can't log in with them, because there is no login form. Or at least it is hidden...
It definitely looks cool. I assume when the cloud backup option is avaiailable you can choose what to back up? Can you choose which folders are synched on a folder-by-folder basis (since I don't need my 500GB photo library on my mac laptop, but I do want it on y desktops)?
Hopefully there is a version that works on Windows Server 2008/2011?
This would kick butt on the mac app store.
Invite requested...
I received my invite awhile back but was disappointed to find out they didn't have support for my 64bit Linux box. Since I primarily run Linux, I was a bit disappointed. I'm fully understanding, though, as I know my demographic by no means has any kind of market share. Still, it would be a very nice additional and would be the pre-cursor to me giving AeroFS a shot at home.
I have been using this for a while and am waiting for full Amazon S3 support, versioning and backup/upload any file (not just in AeroFS folder). I liked how I was able to talk to the creator the day I installed it. He seemed very optimistic. I see a lot of potential in this but as of right now dropbox has it beat. I am looking forward to more updated (soon!)
Not sure I understand how sync works when the same file is being edited from multiple places simultaneously. Who wins? Any pointer appreciated.
Totally unrelated: how do you pronounce aerofs? If I try to say it in French it either comes out as "erofesse" (erotic buttock) or "aerofesse" (flying buttock). That will definitely win points with French-speakers :-)
I really want to try this out, but I'm concerned about conflicts or syncing collisions with Dropbox. Has anyone tried a setup with both AeroFS and Dropbox running simultaneously?
Hey. What does this give me that I can't get from just having a mercurial repository which has a bunch of clones and each clone pushes to the others when something changes?
The other comments are quite explanatory--you should read them. What it gives you is "instant" syncing between multiple computers, and without a centralized online cloud (like Dropbox). So it's a good fit for: non techies who need sync, or situations where you don't want to concern yourself with whether you've synced your repo or not (it does it for you).
I think I missed something... basically it uses P2P instead of a central server that copies my data but doesn't that mean I am sending possibly private data all around the internet to other aero users, though encrypted?
Then isn't that the same situation we had in the DEFCON hacks: what keeps people from recording all your traffic and one fine day when the encryption is not secure anymore, they can simply decrypt it?
If you want to share your data over the internet you kinda need to send it out at one time or another. This traffic can always be intercepted and stored for later use.
I was talking about the part where people use Aero for their personal backups and syncing their own machines, not about sharing with other people.
With something like dropbox traffic goes between me and their servers and whoever is listening in between there.
The way I understand it, with Aero it will go through P2P even if I am just syncing my own machines since both are likely to be behind some sort of NAT or firewall.
If 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.)
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 most current data will be on the machine I'm working on anyways.
The installation feels a bit "heavier" than dropbox which does a better job at staying out of my way, but the advantages of next to unlimited storage and no third-party server are huge for me.