[cool-RR]

Funny, I'm actually biased towards Dropbox. I use it for most of my stuff because of the versioning and the Packrat feature. But there's no reason for Dropbox not to do direct LAN syncing, and no reason for AeroFS not to offer infinite versioning. It may be more complex to design, but definitely feasible. So I don't think that this is an apples-vs-oranges comparison.

[TillE]

> But there's no reason for Dropbox not to do direct LAN syncing, and no reason for AeroFS not to offer infinite versioning.

Really, no reason? None at all?

For "infinite versioning", it's obvious - there's no upper bound on the amount of data the server has to store. Storage space costs money.

As for no direct LAN syncing, someone's already mentioned the reason - consistency. Syncing is already a hard problem, and it's dangerous to allow more things to go wrong because the clients synced but the server didn't receive all the data.

[Dylan16807]

So what if there's no upper bound? Treat it like normal data and charge the normal price. Spideroak already does this.