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Comment by ritonlajoie | Hacker News Reader

What are the differences with AeroFS ?

I believe the use cases are different, which drives a difference in at least the user experience. AeroFS is designed for business use, so we strive to balance simplicity in UI/UX with security/privacy while trying to avoid things like side-channel sharing of secrets. We focus on functionality like managing your team, the ability to remotely wipe devices, control sharing within your organization, and so on, while providing the "Dropbox experience" that end users within the organization ask for, and without us storing any of the data itself.

I agree that the main gripe with AeroFS that people have voiced in this thread is certainly valid. AeroFS _did_ slow down in performance for some users recently. We actually just released a version today that addresses this bug (0.4.181 - see http://ae.ro/Ln2YJJ for the release notes, but it specifically had to do with the way we were initializing our jingle library), and in our own internal tests the performance has improved dramatically.

Not many.

There are a few advanced configurations where BTSync trumps Aero (at least last time I used it - someone, please correct me if these have been implemented).

- One way sync

- Selective device LAN sync (so you can tell it to only sync over LAN)

- Self destructing one-time share keys

- Less-friction on sharing - using a key based copy and paste system

- Powered by BT (this may not be an advantage though since BT is throttled on quite a number of providers through DPI worldwide

A de facto standard, potential opensource clients, free, server-less, not tied to a specific company, and more.

> A de facto standard, > potential opensource clients, > not tied to a specific company,

When the source is closed, and the protocol is closed + encrypted? I think you may be a little optimistic... (Though I do hope that either the source or the protocol get opened)

I think that's what made the original BitTorrent popular. The open protocol. They really need to do the same here if they want this to take off.

Is there any evidence of this?

AeroFS is also server-less, though you can run your own servers.

AeroFS currently does not support ARM.

Nor PowerPC, which apparently many NAS units are using. Mine is a WD My Book Live Duo running Debian/PowerPC.

Additionally, AeroFS relies on Java, which is pretty big dependency (read: pain) to have on resource-restricted environments like a tiny NAS box. The daemon process of AeroFS consumes about 110MB of memory (I guess due to JRE), but my NAS unit has only 256MB memory in total with less than 100MB free, which means even if AeroFS supports PowerPC, there is still no way I could run it smoothly on my NAS without killing its performance.

Bittorrent Sync supports all of x86/x64/ARM/PowerPC, and the download is just a single 3.7MB binary without dependency other than glibc. Running it on my NAS shows it consumes less than 10MB memory. This is just so much nicer for deployment on a wider selection of devices.

I'm definitely going for BTSync now.

This seems superior as it provides more advanced configuration and no limits with the number of parties you can invite. It appears to be free. And no central server. Transfers were painfully slow with Aero, I assume this would be faster.

It has been reported that for big files this is much faster than AeroFS.

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