AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

http://blog.aerofs.com/336/open-for-business

by theboos • 13 years ago

147 92 13 years ago

blog.aerofs.com

rdl11• 13 years ago

This is awesome. AeroFS does everything I want in a file sharing system -- I can either run it entirely on my own machines on LAN and potentially VPN, or at a company on a network also not connected to the Internet, or I can use it as a direct Dropbox alternative (although it lacks some mobile clients and API support).

I've been using it for ~a year or two in beta, as well as all the other alternatives. I still use Dropbox for interoperating with other people who use Dropbox, and for a couple mobile devices which don't support anything else, and I use iCloud for mainly Apple app sync (although it seems to suck for most non-Apple apps) between OSX and iOS, but AeroFS is my preferred option for general file sharing use.

The only downside I've found is dealing with Java on certain OSes (OSX and Windows 7 at times), but generally OS-level Java is fine, it's browser Java which sucks.

newman3145• 13 years ago

I'm not too keen on the fact that AeroFS runs on Java as I would prefer to run Java free systems as much as possible (Go version would be nice =) but am willing to live with it if that's the only option.

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

We're working on it (a Java-free system, not a Go version, sorry ;)

See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5484566

urza3• 13 years ago

Exactly, I removed java from all my computers about week ago. And since I am having my personal debian server, I installed ownCloud 5 on it for filesyncing.. and I am happy so far.. the clients are in C++

notimetorelax2• 13 years ago

How do you run it on a network disconnected from Internet? That's a very interesting scenario for the company I work at. I assumed that you need to login with AeroFS credentials when setting up clients and servers, is there an alternative?

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

Depends on the size of your company, we'd like to explore this a bit further. Shoot us an email at business@aerofs.com and we'll follow up ASAP

bobf• 13 years ago

AeroFS is awesome! I've been using it since the alpha release and have had nothing but positive experiences. Like rdl says, it does everything I want in a file sharing system.

k2enemy• 13 years ago

I was also a long-time user of AeroFS, but SyncApp from BitTorrent has worked much better for me so I've switched over. I would recommend giving it a try.

ineedtosleep2• 13 years ago

Been using it for over two months now during private beta and pretty much just gave up last week.

The main reason is because one of my linked computers is a Linux computer. I've tried on both Ubuntu, through the deb package, and Arch, through AUR, and the synching either never happens or happens after a few hours. For the former, restarting the service a few times somehow fixes it, but it's never clear why.

zarvox6• 13 years ago

Hey, this is Drew from AeroFS. Sorry to hear you've been having trouble syncing. If you want to report an issue (AeroFS -> Help -> Report a Problem in the GUI, or aerofs-sh report "Description of your issue" from your terminal of choice), we will be happy to take a look at your issues and see what's going wrong.

ineedtosleep2• 13 years ago

You guys have been helpful when I've had problems, don't get me wrong. Sorry if it feels like I'm just dumping on your product. I just always assumed that since I'm just using aerofs from the AUR, it's not exactly completely supported, so I never bothered with sending in reports.

opminion• 13 years ago

Have you reported this to them?

Perhaps it's best not to wait for them to go into public beta in order to report it publicly.

erohead• 13 years ago

We've been using AeroFS to share multi-GB folders and files for the last year. It's perfect for video and images...no size caps!

futhey• 13 years ago

Great news, best of luck, but you might have to iterate on the pricing...

rdl11• 13 years ago

Yeah, I think you should be able to pay for support even with 10-20 users. If I were using this in a business as my primary file sharing system, even with 5 users, I'd be a lot more comfortable paying more to get the "custom" support. Although LDAP/AD integration would be really important for most deployments anyway, so you'd already be in the custom tier.

incongruity• 13 years ago

The pricing doesn't make sense to me – 4 person teams are penalized vs. 3 person teams. The jump goes from $0/month to $40/month, so the incremental cost for going from 3 to 4 people is steep (at least compared to all the other incremental moves).

It's a minor detail, but it seems odd to me.

rdl11• 13 years ago

Atlassian goes from $10 to $1500 from 0-10 and 10+....

rdl11• 13 years ago

Not to be "that guy", but the logo in the upper left of your blog needs to go to www.aerofs.com, not blog.aerofs.com.

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

fixed!

Whitespace• 13 years ago

I was just saying the same to a coworker of mine. Not to take away from the announcement of what seems to be a really great product, but I'm really confused why a lot of companies do this. It shouldn't frustrate/enrage me, but it does, almost as much as: Three. Word. Motto.

rdl11• 13 years ago

It's not the default for the blog software. Blog is usually as separate as possible from everything else about your site (which is good, because all the non-static blog engines have HORRIBLE security, especially Wordpress...)

gexla• 13 years ago

Wow, finally! And congrats. This would be the only application which would require running Java on my dev server, so that's a point against it when evaluating it against other options. But I don't want to knock a developer reaching for the best tool for the job in getting this thing finally opened up to everyone. Thanks!

dools• 13 years ago

Cool product! Although the first thing I tried was to share a nested folder to see if it was REALLY a Dropbox killer for me ;)

Can't wait to start playing with the team server version! It would be great if I were able to get ad-hoc access to files on the team server from, say, the android app (the same way I do with Dropbox).

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

Android app is currently being beta tested, and will indeed grab files from the team server as you requested :) --yuri

rurounijones• 13 years ago

Possibly Offtopic - If you are going to link directly to blog posts of companies (especially if they have been in private beta) could you PLEASE have a "What is $product" bit.

Either one or two lines in the initial part of each post or preferably in an easily noticeable sidebar.

I had to go to the main site before I could figure out what aerofs was.

thejosh• 13 years ago

Seriously, please do this. The grab on the homepage is great, but we have to click away before seeing what AeroFS actually is!

The grabpoint "AeroFS encrypts your data end-to-end, and only shares your files with those who you invite. Files are never stored in the public cloud." is good, you should stick that into the header, especially for a press release / HN submission where you will be getting attention.

orangethirty3• 13 years ago

That's marketing 101 folks. You should always include a short paragraph describing your offerings.

veb• 13 years ago

At least the logo goes to the main page of the website, and not the main page of the blog.

EDIT: heh, that was fixed 46 minutes ago.

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! I just updated the blog with a quick blurb.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

I've recently started using AeroFS although my invite email was gathering dust in my inbox for a long period of time and it was exactly because I couldn't figure out (in few second) why I should use it.

Well, this is actually a relatively different service compared to Dropbox and plethora of other store-your-files-in-the-cloud types. There is no storing of files in the cloud. However, it does the machine-to-machine sync very fast.

wiradikusuma• 13 years ago

How does it different than existing "built-in" folder sharing (e.g. SMB)?

glesica• 13 years ago

It works over the Internet. It is basically Dropbox, but peer-to-peer within your personal collection of machines. They do not provide the storage.

abcd_f3• 13 years ago

How is sharing different from synching?

kevinsd• 13 years ago

I am experimenting Dropbox + Truecrypt. The trade-off is between limited free space v.s. hassle of maintaining your own cloud.

ripperdoc• 13 years ago

Try Boxcryptor, probably even less hassle to set up?

dataisfun• 13 years ago

Congrats Yuri. I love the product.

aganek• 13 years ago

Congrats AeroFS team!

ukd1• 13 years ago

Linux support!?! <3

eupharis• 13 years ago

Nice! Just installed. I love the feature list. The fact that is was easier to install and has a nicer UI than Dropbox was a nice surprise :)

Since AeroFS never stores the files, the upload speed must be determined by the upload speed of every team member who is sharing the file, yes?

At the moment, how good is AeroFS at chopping up the bandwidth to get good speeds among, say, four users with upload caps of 1 mbps? How close will it get to 4 mbps?

Do external collaborators help upload on folders they are sharing?

P.S. for Ubuntu Unity users: after setup, as with Dropbox, there is one tweak. You need to run the old:

  gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

jcastro• 13 years ago

You don't need to do this for dropbox, it has a native indicator.

andymoe2• 13 years ago

It is not clear from the site if the data I give to AeroFS is encrypted at rest. There is a section called "End-to-end Security" that states:

  AeroFS uses AES-256 with 2048-bit RSA to create secure
  connections directly from one device to another. Because
  encryption is end-to-end, even we can't see your data or
  even file names.

But this does not actually tell me in plain terms if you encrypt my data when it's sitting on your servers or not and that's actually a more important question to answer. Everyone expects data to be encrypted in transit. You don't get extra points for that. Would you mind clarifying if the data is ever on your servers in an unencrypted form?

zarvox6• 13 years ago

Your data is never stored on our servers in an unencrypted form. Moreover, the data is never stored on our servers at all.

In some scenarios (when two clients are both behind aggressive firewalls, for instance) the data may be _relayed_ by our servers, but in those cases it is encrypted (end-to-end) between the devices syncing using their respective public/private keys, so we can't eavesdrop.

andymoe2• 13 years ago

Great, thanks for the response!

andrewflnr2• 13 years ago

I'm confused. This makes your servers sound almost entirely useless most of the time. What role do they normally play?

rdl11• 13 years ago

You can go straight peer to peer when behind less-than-totally-aggressive firewalls, using the double open trick used by voip apps like Skype, right?

eps3• 13 years ago

Do you have a spec of your security model?

I really hope it's not a homebrew solution but something based off existing protocols. In either case, since the security and privacy is your primary feature, a full disclosure of hos it works inside is a must.

irrelative• 13 years ago

Nice job guys! You've built a really nice product and it's great to see you expanding your user base!

newman3145• 13 years ago

3 things.

1) I kinda feel like AeroFS has taken so long to come out that Dropbox occupies a huge chunk of mindshare. It's almost as if AerosFS will need to spend a bunch of time answering the "why should I switch" question. That said, I would love to see AeroFS succeed as I am less than keen on Dropbox less than stellar handling of security in the past as well as their general security model.

2) This leads to my second point. AeroFS, please please work with 1Password to do whatever you need to get 1Password+AeroFS working. If this is available, I'm switching right away.

3) Mobile support. Yes, please.

rdl11• 13 years ago

OTOH, most businesses don't yet use Dropbox (much) today. If AeroFS's market is the enterprise, they're competing with Windows file sharing/SMB/Samba, NFS, etc., not so much with Dropbox. It's a bit skewed in Silicon Valley and in the consumer market.

newman3145• 13 years ago

A bunch of my enterprise clients seem to be fairly familiar and they seem to all have come through the personal use route.

If the target market is enterprise, companies like Box compete there and supposedly have more controls. That said, Box does not have filesystem integration, the last time I checked.

eps3• 13 years ago

Any plans for Java-free implementation of the client software? It's a pretty big and an unwelcome dependency.

yurisagalov7• 13 years ago

We've actually just released a Java-free installable for Windows about a week ago (see release 0.4.173 @ http://support.aerofs.com/knowledgebase/articles/93285-relea...).

What we've done in the Windows installation is bundle a minimal JRE as a light-weight library. The JRE is loaded by AeroFS at runtime and is otherwise completely isolated, so no dependency exists on Java in Windows. Based on how well that has worked out so far, we'd like to do a similar approach for OSX and Linux soon.

eps3• 13 years ago

Great. That's a sensible solution.

Congrats by the way :)

newman3145• 13 years ago

How much memory does this typically consume?

urza3• 13 years ago

Damn, so back to AeroFS? :) I was quite happy with the syncing (although sometimes the sync started after a long time), but I decided to dump java from my system..

Do you have ETA for os X and Linux of this "java free" versions?

teekert• 13 years ago

Oh how nice it would be to be able to run this on my Raspberry Pi's and have off site backups on the cheap. Since most of the people I know now have fiber I'd make a nice distributed system of RPi's to keep everyone's pictures safe.

andybak• 13 years ago

Had hoped support for syncing arbitrary folders was going to be in for launch: http://support.aerofs.com/forums/67721-feature-requests/sugg...

chmike2• 13 years ago

For me Java is a no no because of all the update and security problems with it. Beside it isn't a lightweight and fast platform. I know many people that waisted a lot of time with Java software upgrading problems because of broken backward compatibility.

The other problem is the pricing model. If I host everything and use my own bandwidth, what do I pay for ? Software development and upgrade ? This is very expensive for a user with a non profit activity who just want to stay in control with its own data.

notimetorelax2• 13 years ago

As far as I understand there's no need to pay if you don't use the teams feature or don't have external collaborators.

Java seems to be a nice way to provide consistent experience across different platforms, I don't even want to think of installing OwnCloud on Windows. And with OwnCloud I'm even more concerned about security as it's written on PHP, but I may be biased here.

kayoone2• 13 years ago

Even with Java this is miles more secure than something like Dropbox or other Cloud Storage where you host all your data on someones elses server. So yeah, Java as a technology choice might not be perfect but which other tech is flawless anyway ? Id argue that properly securing your servers/clients is a much bigger problem than someone exploiting the AeroFS software.

Pricing is for Teams only which makes sense, for everyone (teams of up to 3) its free, which is awesome!

chmike2• 13 years ago

Thank you for the princing clarification. I missed that, my bad.

nsmartt• 13 years ago

I really want to use AeroFS, but I have a few criticisms.

a) One of its goals is privacy, but it asks for my first and last name. Why is this needed? I could always lie, but I'd much prefer a single field (e.g. display name) that doesn't explicitly ask for this.

b) It tries to download a .deb file if I'm using Linux. I'd much rather click this myself, and I suspect it does this regardless of whether my system is Debian-based.

c) When signing up, I got no notifications at all. This may be due to NoScript, but I had no indication that my signup was completed. I thought perhaps my password wasn't valid or something along those lines, but I eventually tried to sign in-- it worked.

d) "Non-Ubuntu users can also download the tgz archive." .deb files are specific to all Debian-based systems, not just Ubuntu. Is it fine to install the .deb (which you've tried to download for me) on other Debian-based systems or just Ubuntu? It's unclear.

AeroFS is potentially great, but this isn't the first time I've reported concerns over a, b, and d.

Edit: added d, modified last sentence for clarity

Myrth• 13 years ago

Get dummy html in json request...

kayoone2• 13 years ago

When i just have 2 clients syncing with each other and one of them is not permanently available to sync, this isnt going to work very good right ?

So id need some central always-on server to sync my stuff to, to habe it all synced and secure all the time.

afics• 13 years ago

How does it compare to Tahoe-LAFS¹?

¹https://tahoe-lafs.org

drdaeman• 13 years ago

Two different things.

Tahoe-LAFS is a secure storage system (protocol and free software implementation). It does not handle synchronization between devices (only RAID-like replication).

AeroFS is a sync service (proprietary software only). It does not provide any storage, but only syncs data between your devices.

yason• 13 years ago

End-to-end encrypted private file sharing darknet that basically appears as a regular folder and doesn't share anything outside your friends. Given some critical mass, that'd just be way too user-friendly for sharing files with $FRIENDS.

Now I'd like to know what the MAFIAA can do about that? This is where it's headed anyway, what the world needs is a mass-market darknet software and this sort of thing just might be it, given Dropbox's popularity.

veesahni• 13 years ago

Can I point AeroFS at the root of my NAS and have it back up everything (including permissions and userid/groupid metadata) to another physical location?

brass92• 13 years ago

Why did you obfuscate the jar files? :( Why no love for opensource?

sultezdukes• 13 years ago

Even if they didn't obfuscate the jar files, it wouldn't be open source.

AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

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