AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers | Hacker News Reader

AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers

aerofs.com

335 pointsdli282117 comments

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'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.

QNAP have some packaging stuff of their own, and make it simple to one-click install and keep it updated.

http://www.qnap.com/QPKG.asp

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.

Since up votes are hidden now, just want to make it clear that I +1 this.

Regarding #5, the 'a' icon in the menubar does rotate on significant activity on OS X.

Just noticed the 'a' menubar icon changed to the new folder-on-a-cloud icon. The cloud does animate on significant activity.

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.

>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.

"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 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.

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

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.

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'?

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 :)

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 :)

love an invite if possible. timesuck.guid@gmail.com

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.

Is there any way to speed Unison up on large datasets? It runs unusably slow even to scan changes of something like my mp3 directory.

I had read awhile back that Unison does not preserve HFS+'s extended attributes. Has that changed in a recent version?

Update: AeroFS now preserves modification times across devices :)

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?

There's a window with a list of current transfers with progress, speed and an ETA per transfer, but no global ETA (yet).

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.

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'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.

If you select the learn more link, you can see that they have basically built a P2P distributed files storage system.

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.

Can anyone shed some light on that? Thanks.

From what I can tell, it's neither: it's just a directory (and subdirectories) on the existing filesystem; like Dropbox.

"(...) a Library is realy just a folder on your computer!" http://support.aerofs.com/customer/portal/articles/25637-wha...

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. Definitely looks like a potentially nice, secure Dropbox replacement.

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

Yeah that's an interesting choice of wording. I think unrestricted storage would have been more accurate. Unlimited does grab your attention though.

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.

There is, yes. There's also a headless daemon.

Yes there is :)

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.

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?

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.