[tryp]

This looks very interesting, but the it's a bit difficult to figure out what it actually is from the website. My impression is that it's like a more featureful take on Unison ("two-way rsync" iirc) with a central server to facilitate NAT traversal.

I suppose they probably haven't figured out their eventual pricing model, but I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month just for coordinating NAT traversal, papering over dynamic IPs and a web interface to set sync policy. For the most part, when my computers are sync'd peer-to-peer, I really don't need or want a copy of my data in the cloud -- my boxes _are_ the cloud. That means that their typical incremental cost per user would be practically zero.

[pge]

it looks like they ultimately will charge for cloud backup (just like dropbox). As you note, the incremental cost of user is zero, so they don't incur a cost by distributing lots of client applications (unlike dropbox, who incurs costs for free customers that use the <2GB plan). it will be interesting to see if dropbox responds. I like the model aerofs proposes. I'm a dropbox user but I use it entirely for the file syncing across three machines - I've only once used the web access to my files (i.e. only once used the cloud storage that aerofs would not provide). If AeroFS has the same usability as dropbox, I would switch to get more storage for free.

[nroach]

I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the lack of a web interface. I've been using AeroFS and Dropbox heavily but haven't felt that I'm at the point where I could give either one up completely. Dropbox is too costly for syncing everything on my drives and I'd prefer not to have sensitive documents on someone else's server.

But, AeroFS requires a client installation and sync to get any access. I've used the Dropbox web interface and iPhone app numerous times to look up a file or reference when I was away from the office. Sure, I could set up a web interface on my desktop as an alternative, but that's not end-user simple. It's also a problem in that, at least on OSX, changes made my system-level processes (such as file sharing) don't always register as modification in the File System Event Database, and thus don't get synced.

[dstein]

Indeed. Dropbox has validated the market and there probably is room for competitors because there are a lot of use-cases and power-user specific features that Dropbox doesn't cover and might not even want to.

[tomjen3]

If you select the learn more link, you can see that they have basically built a P2P distributed files storage system.

[4ad]

I also don't understand from the website if this is a real filesystem (mounts in the namespace of the OS, works with any program etc) or o userspace utility, something like an explorer/finder plugin.

Can anyone shed some light on that? Thanks.

[icebraining]

From what I can tell, it's neither: it's just a directory (and subdirectories) on the existing filesystem; like Dropbox.

"(...) a Library is realy just a folder on your computer!" http://support.aerofs.com/customer/portal/articles/25637-wha...