AeroFS/S3: Private syncing to Amazon's Cloud made easy

I too really like the idea of aerofs. It was pretty buggy when I first tried it (years ago, at least it feels that way). In the meantime I found spideroak, which can sync whatever directories you tell it to sync, there's no special "spideroak" directory that you have to use. It also encrypts everything locally with my key that they have no access too before sending my data to their servers. It does have to use their servers though, it isn't p2p like aerofs.

I'm a cofounder at AeroFS. The main advantage of AeroFS is P2P file syncing without using servers. S3 support is a nice addition to the basic functionality, allowing users to use S3 as a "super" peer.

I think they're a P2P, 'cloud' storage service. Space is shared by users (or that's what I understand). You can also choose to upload (some) stuff to their own servers. And everything with strong AES encryption.

I haven't tried it yet, I still stick to the old fashioned solutions (Dropbox, Backblaze, Time Machine) as they serve me well, but sounds like something interesting with uses to explore (…maybe not the very same ones that have current services!).

Our current concern is with making a product that works well for our users. We do have some paid services that will be coming in the future :)

I'm an engineer at AeroFS, and yep, we use scrypt. The client applies scrypt with a per-user salt to the S3 encryption passphrase you enter at install-time, which gives a 512-bit key that the client stores. This is not quite the AES key itself - we apply PBKDF2 an additional time to this stored value to derive the actual 256-bit AES key (it fit more easily into our existing codebase...), but it retains the same hardness of derivation that scrypt provides (unless the stored key is stolen, as is the case in any system with stored keys).

In this manner, the AeroFS client can (and does) access the data stored on S3 directly, but if you were to lose the machine that runs the client (but still know the password you used at setup), you can still decrypt those files by deriving the same key on a different machine.

Colin Percival's writings ([1] in particular) were very helpful in picking the appropriate set of cryptographic primitives to use. Thanks, cperciva! :D

[1] - http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-rig...

(edited to add that I work at AeroFS)

AeroFS* lol

hehe - I use SyncDocs which does the same job of keeping Larry Page out of my Google Docs

Second. I would love to be able to use 1Password with AeroFS instead of Dropbox.

Yeah I've been waiting to use AeroFS for years.. I don't understand why it would take so long for a product that has incredibly small marginal costs (unlike say, Dropbox or Gmail where there were/are real server storage costs involved).

They claim that if you invite 5-10 of your friends you can get an invite, but I don't want to invite 10 people just to be a beta user of the product, it's unfair to my friends to do so unless I'm a rabid evangelist who genuinely loves the product (which I'm not, yet).

You don't have to invite the backlog of users straight away, but try to invite say 5-10% of the beta-requested users every month (I don't mind giving 3 months warning for AeroFS to get its systems ready, so AT MOST by September/November it should begin this)

Every time I search around the web for AeroFS I see claims of it being vaporware but then there also always seems to be pro-AeroFS employees astroturfing. Even here, the CEO (not a regular user) is linking to a company blog-post (a practise which I don't necessarily have any against, but it's worth noting)

AeroFS can be so much - it fills an incredible important niche (like someone said in another comment - an easy to setup P2P rsync). Local, cross-computer syncing is an important thing - many places in the developed and developing world have limited internet bandwidth but heaps of local network bandwidth. Hundreds of gigabytes to multiple terabytes of media, documents and data need to be shared and Dropbox would require immense amounts of money to do so.

It may not be as profitable as Dropbox on a per-user basis, but it doesn't need to be since we are using our own bandwidth so it doesn't cost AeroFS anything.

They had YC-funding, have like 15-ish employees last I checked. With that, Dropbox arguable is in the process of changing the internet forever. AeroFS can do the same.

Might help if I actually read the whole article, drop your requests here: iwants3@aerofs.com

Hi Tautologistics,

There's a good chance you won't ever see this response since the thread has aged off the front page, but I figured I'd respond to it anyway, just in case.

We've actually addressed this behavior in the beta release recently by introducing local revision history. Unfortunately we haven't exposed this through the UI yet, but if this happens again in the near future I'd be happy to help you recover.