Create your own local Dropbox with AeroFS | Hacker News Reader

Create your own local Dropbox with AeroFS

arstechnica.com

66 pointsvectorbunny33 comments

Honest question to the AeroFS team: is AeroFS ever going to ship, even into public beta? The earliest referenced story on HN is 792 days old.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538731

If Ars is doing a review of your beta, you should certainly be able to convince yourself there is a MVP in your hands. Why the perpetual private beta? Wouldn't you rather find out if this is something lots of people want and would be willing to pay for?

I would worry you finally ship the thing and realize that you need to tailor it to a different audience. Or perhaps the folk are willing to pay are rather happy with Dropbox and a centralized model.

Hola, The Ars review (while super awesome) was actually completely unexpected and unsolicited. I realize that we first posted about AeroFS almost two years ago, but we haven't been idle, and we have been releasing invites regularly. Users have also been able to invite other users to AeroFS from day one, and many of them ahve been doing this.

We keep AeroFS in private beta mostly because we have an already overwhelming amount of feedback to work with. We want to make sure that we make the users who are with us today (and who have been with us for the past two years) as happy as possible, before releasing it to the masses.

Cheers, Yuri

(ps. sorry for the late response, today was the last day of one of our interns and we took him out for lunch)

Is there any way to bump one's priority on the invite list? I've been waiting for at least a year.

The problem with this private beta, as I see it, is that you've gotten a sizeable portion of your potential early adopters interested in the product; but now you just repeatedly frustrate them by keeping them out of the beta without even so much as an email update. I've been on your list for years with nothing but radio silence. You might have been better off staying in stealth mode, because now, whenever I hear the term "AeroFS" I just feel irked and disappointed. It's like you're trying to alienate your biggest fans.

If "for years" isn't an exaggeration, then shoot me an email asap so I can see why you haven't gotten an invite yet. We've been sending invites in the order that they come in, and although the backlog is long, I certainly don't think it's in the years :(

I got my "Thanks for signing up!" email via Launchrock on 14 Sept 2011, and haven't got a single email from you since... (email address as per my HN profile, if you want to look it up)

Same story here. Exactly the same date (14 September 2011), haven't heard anything since.

Same date for me. It's really a pity that nothing has been released for so long. Restricting open signups is fine, but the fact that people request invites means that there is definite support for the product, and those people are clearly willing to put up with a few bugs. These are exactly the kind of people who add fantastic value to the product, since you're essentially getting free product testing from people who are already passionate about the product.

The backlog is definitely not being handled in order. I signed up a year ago with my person address and never got back. For shits and giggles, I signed up earlier this year with my work address and got the invite after about 5 months waiting.

Still never got anything on my personal address though.

Meanwhile you can use ownCloud - http://owncloud.org/

Still not perfect, little bit more work needed to install the server part, but it works, is opensource, you can access your files over web browser (mobile apps on the way), new versions ship regularly and as a bonus the sync client apps are written c++/Qt so no annoying java required.

Not holding my breath for AeroFS. Following Git Annex Assistant development blog and waiting for the beta. Sounds awsome! http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/

Oh man, I am so excited about git-annex assistant. As nice as dropbox is, it still involves far to much file-shuffling for me to get full enjoyment out of it. (Also, its new Android application is... unfortunate). git-annex assistant really seems like it will become the killer feature of whatever device you put it on though.

Do you know if you can still donate to his kickstarter campaign to get in on the betas? I know he blew away his goal and time is up, but that guy works for far too little.

There is a Flattr button on the annex front page. Subscribed for a year...

I'm very excited for git annex assistant. I've been looking for a few years for a "Dropbox with my own server" type of service that I can use to easily keep large files in sync.

There are a handful of programs like unison that do the syncing well, but don't have nice fsevent type triggers for all platforms. Git based programs like Sparkleshare don't work because git chokes on large repositories. Syncany seems to be abandoned. AeroFS was close, but it kept syncing huge files back and forth between my computers when they hadn't been modified. Now I'm eagerly waiting to try git annex assistant.

This sign-in exists only so that your Aero FS-running computers can get the 2048-bit RSA encryption keys keys they need—your computers then authenticate against each other using these keys, and can do so even if the AeroFS servers are down.

Does this mean that if AeroFS goes down (gets sold, shut-down, whatever), the clients running on my machines will continue to sync P2P?

For the most part, yes, until your certificates expire :)

Good to know! I got my beta invite recently and I'm excited to play around with it. Out of curiosity, what's the lifespan of the cert?

No open source? Invite-only? Totally uninteresting.

I gave them my email address for an invite months ago, and since then I've seen lots and lots of talk about AeroFS, but still it's not available, so I lost interest. If you have a web page and a blog and repeatedly get mentioned on HN, but you don't release some kind of public beta for more than 6 months, you're crazy.

I did get an invite and installed, but I can't actually do anything with it. There's no Android client, so it just sits on my laptop doing nothing.

I thought it would at least have some sort of local network sharing service like DAAP, UPnP or anything at all.

The Android client is under very active development. If you'd like, feel free to upvote http://support.aerofs.com/forums/67721-feature-requests/sugg... and you'll get notified as soon as it's ready!

Yeah I was excited too. We actually got invites, but when we ran into trouble, were never able to get a response from support and gave up.

That's quite unusual and unfortunate! If you're still willing, give our newest version a tryshoot me an email at yuri@aerofs.com and I'll make sure someone looks at your problems ASAP.

We're actually usually very responsive in our support channels (support@aerofs.com, twitter, and the support.aerofs.com forums), so my sincere apologies.

Closed source is a definite dealbreaker: how do I know there aren't horrible flaws in their cryptographic protocols? Short of reverse engineering their binaries there's not you can do.

The features AeroFS provides seem incredibly similar to what you can get from open source alternatives, for example the Tahoe-LAFS distributed encrypted filesystem and Duplicati:

Tahoe: http://www.tahoe-lafs.org/

Duplicati: http://www.duplicati.com/ (can store data to Tahoe-LAFS)

I've been using AeroFS beta for a while, and so far, it is my favorite of the file sharing systems. It isn't as good as big local disk for video editing or anything, but great for keeping team files in sync across a bunch of machines.

I'm less concerned about source being available and would rather know if AeroFS is ready to serve a replacement for Dropbox to store my 1Password files.

On a side note: Release notes for AeroFS http://support.aerofs.com/knowledgebase/articles/93285-relea...

Cool review from Ars as always, but Aerofs by staying this long closed, is kinda slowly killin itself, There is pleanty of added competition now, even from the big guys (dropbox, gdrive, skydrive,...), and now there is even for the exact same functions that Aerofs does, like Cubby... and im using Cubby for like 2 months... and it works pretty good, got the invite in 2 days, while i've been waiting for my Aerofs invite since like the begining of the year, for me its vaporware.

I've been waiting for an invite for well over a year, maybe two years, don't really remember. Frankly I'm more than a little annoyed. Why even bother having an invite feature if you never send out invites? It's just being dishonest.

DropBox should just buy AeroFS.

Tonido Sync (http://www.tonido.com/app_sync_home.html) provides the same private, local sync like AeroFS. the Tonido solution is very mature and it also has mobile apps for all the popular mobile OSes (iOS,Android, Blackberry and Windows 7.5)

OT, but this picture from Tonico is funny http://www.tonido.com/images/syncarch_mobile.png Couldn't they find a newer PC clipart or is it some kind of quirk humor?

last time I checked, the Tonido syncing app had 2GB limit to syncing feature in free version

When it become not acceptable to charge money for a software service. Tonido is a mature offering and works. Customers are ready to pay money for its worth. I would rather choose a software that will charge money for it rather than a free one.

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