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Comment by namityadav | Hacker News Reader

We're looking at AeroFS and BitTorrent Sync for sharing sensitive files with our team members. We're leaning towards BS mainly because this feels completely P2P, whereas AeroFS may become useless if the company shuts down. Is that right? I'd love to hear from someone who has used both of these about stability, sync conflicts, CPU load etc. Also would love to hear about plans to open source BS.

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I'm looking for something like this too. My big concerns of a Dropbox alternative is:

* Ability to handle large files (300MB incompressible Photoshop) and able to handle large complete data stores. (1 TB, which is impossible with Dropbox)

* Selectability for certain folders on certain users (no need for all data to be on all machines)

* The ability to 'archive' files to only the host.

* Good LAN networking with host so that the portable machines (iPads, Retina Macbook Pros with puny 128GB HDD) can use it fine.

I think either of them would rapidly become useless if the company shut down -- if it's not being kept updated, the clients will cease to work on newer OSes, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about the differences.

Maybe both BT and AeroFS should help customers mitigate that risk by committing to open source their code if they shut down. AeroFS has a revenue model, though, so I'd be less concerned about them shutting down this product.

If BT stops supporting this app, we can still use it for at least the next few years. That's fairly comforting, IMHO.

Did you also look at SparkleShare?

Thanks for the suggestion! I just did, and looks like SparkleShare may not be a good tool if you have very large files (GBs).

I wish it would work with HTTP.

Did you look at git-annex? Its developer is working on an easier to use multiplatform UI.

I did. But, some of our team-members are non-technical. And for work-reasons, some of them are going to be using Windows. Both of those reasons meant that git-annex wasn't a serious contender for our use-case (not yet, anyway).

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