After we launched AeroFS/S3 integration, we quickly learned from our users that the best use case for it is with our forthcoming Team Server product. Now that we’ve released the AeroFS Team Server, we’d like to show you just how easy it is to use S3 as your secure, encrypted (using your own keys!) endpoint:

Once you’ve created your AeroFS account, log in at www.aerofs.com, find “Install” next to your username in the upper right, and select “Team Server.” ** Note that this option is visible to everyone who is an administrator of a team. This includes if you are a team of one (yourself.)**

Follow the setup wizard, and you will see this prompt during the setup process:

Click “Advanced…” and you will see an option to change computer name and where to store files:

When you choose “Store files on Amazon S3″ you will be prompted for S3 credentials:

Setting up Team Server with S3 is also available via aerofs-cli. Simply input your S3 credentials, a bucket ID, and a encryption key when prompted. And voila, you’re done.

As always, if you have any questions or hiccups setting up Team Server with S3, please ask for help at support@aerofs.com or visit support.aerofs.com to hear from other AeroFS users.

Happy syncing (with S3),

The AeroFS Team

To those new to our blog: AeroFS is a private file-syncing and collaboration tool. AeroFS encrypts your data end-to-end, and only shares your files with those who you invite so your data is never stored in the public cloud.

Today marks an important date for our team and an important milestone in the maturity of AeroFS as a product: We’re officially removing the ‘private beta’ label and allowing you to sign up on our website directly. Although no longer necessary, we will be going through our invite list and inviting any outstanding users to sign up and try AeroFS, so expect an email from us soon.

Teamwork and Collaboration

AeroFS was built from the ground-up with collaboration in mind, and today we are taking a step in formalizing that experience: By default, when you create a new AeroFS account, you are also creating a new team.

Teams in AeroFS are a way for a group of people to organize themselves. Team Members benefit from central user administration (team admins have administrative functionality over their team members), as well as the ability to automatically sync/backup all their data to a central team server.

Team Members can also add external collaborators — people who they share one or more folders with who are not actually part of their team.

As we continue adding features to the product, you will notice more and more features being built around the concepts of team members and external collaborators, but for now the important distinction is that external collaborators are not a part of your team.

Pricing

Launching out of private beta also means that we can finally share our pricing model with you. We’ve thought about pricing for a long time and have come up with a model that we feel is both fair to our users and scalable for us. You can see the full details here.

Existing Users: Your current AeroFS configurations should all be grandfathered through. Each of you will automatically become a member of your own team, and those of you who are interested in formalizing your teams are of course encouraged to do so. You are free to continue using AeroFS in your current configuration for as long as you’d like, but if you need to add additional team members or external collaborators you may be prompted to pay.

Final Thoughts

Getting to launch has been a long and interesting road for us. We’ve grown as a team, improved our product, and gained quite a few loyal users, customers, and fans along the way. We want to thank you all for being part of this amazing experience so far, and look forward to serving you even better in the future!

All the best,

Yuri & The AeroFS Team

What is our New Year’s resolution, you ask? To streamline, streamline, streamline. One of our goals this year is to improve the way you interact with AeroFS, starting with the way you invite and share AeroFS.

Effective immediately, you will be able to sign up and download AeroFS, as well as manage folder invitations directly on aerofs.com. No more inputting pesky 8-character invitation codes! Similarly, existing AeroFS users can now manage their invitations from any browser, on any device, even if AeroFS isn’t installed on that machine. Sending invitations to AeroFS and AeroFS folders will remain the same: you can invite people from the AeroFS menu or from the command line.

New User Sign Up Instructions:

1. An invitation email arrives in your inbox, inviting you to sign up and install AeroFS.

2. The link in the email brings you to a one-step account creation process:

3. Upon completion, you are directed to download and launch AeroFS.

Accepting Shared Folders:

1. Open the email inviting you to a shared folder, and follow the invitation link.
   

2. Once signed in, you will see a list of all pending folder invitations:

3. Choose to Accept or Ignore folder invitations.

4. Do this one just one machine, and voila! All of your AeroFS clients will join the shared folder immediately.

NOTE: You can view your pending folder invitations at any time by logging into your AeroFS account. Simply click “Sign In” at the top-right corner of the AeroFS home page.

This update is the first of many improvements we are making in the near future, so stay tuned!

As always, we’d love to hear from you either on our user forum or via support@aerofs.com.

Happy Syncing,

Linda & The AeroFS Team

“We liked what we saw today and we’re ready to make you an offer.” I still remember hearing Yuri, one of the co-founders of AeroFS, tell me that after a grueling full day of interviews at their office this past January. A lot has happened since then, and now I’m almost finished with my summer internship there. But looking back on my experience I can now confidently say that I know I picked the right company to intern with this summer.

My first day at AeroFS was a flurry of activity. In the morning I had a meeting to figure out what I would start working on, at least for the next few weeks or so, and after that I spent the day getting my computer set up and beginning to sift through the code base. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed; I was thrown head over heels into a new codebase using a framework I wasn’t familiar with and given a task to do using that framework within that codebase. But all the other engineers were very understanding as I got up to speed and were always willing to answer any questions that I had. After a few days that feeling of being overwhelmed started to fade, and as I began to feel at home in this new codebase my productivity went up.

AeroFS has a lot of different perks that I’ve able to take advantage of during the time I spent here. By far the biggest perk though, in my opinion, is that lunch is provided for us every day. We generally eat lunch as a group which leads to a lot of interesting conversation, and our group lunches are a great midday break that we all take together. We’ve gotten to do a lot of fun activities outside of work too, like spending a day renovating a house in East Palo Alto for Habitat for Humanity or going to barbecues together at Yuri’s place.

I think my favorite features of AeroFS as a company to work for are the people who work here and its flat organizational structure. All the engineers here are absolutely brilliant, and in every conversation I have with them about technology I feel like I learn something new. The other day, for example, a few of us were talking about old desktop processors, and one of the other engineers explained to me why branch misprediction on the Pentium 4 was so costly compared to other processor models (to keep you from having to look it up, it’s because the processor’s pipeline was much longer than it was in most other processors at the time). Because the people here are all awesome, the flat organizational structure in use works really well too. From interns to the CEO, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is free to join in on discussions about any aspect of the company. This structure is great for a company the size of AeroFS, and I think it allows us to stay nimble and make better decisions as a whole.

My experience at AeroFS was very different from the experiences most of my friends in software engineering internships had at the companies they worked for. I was given real responsibility throughout the summer to build something important. If my work began to slip the company would suffer because the ship date for the product I’m working on would be pushed back. And while this was a little bit stressful, it replicates what working at a startup would really be like and was probably my favorite part about this internship. Because the interns are all working on projects that are critical to the company I always felt like we were treated with the same level of respect as the full time employees at AeroFS, and for me as a 19 year old working with people who are much more experienced than I am this was a pretty big deal.

I went with my gut in picking AeroFS. I liked the people here the best of anywhere I interviewed, but I didn’t know a huge amount about our product or our market going into the internship and had no objective way to compare what my experience here could be compared to what it could be at another company. But looking back on the past three months I spent here I think my gut was right.

Roneil Rumburg is an incoming sophomore Stanford Student and interned at AeroFS this past summer. He asked us whether he could blog about his experience, and we were happy to oblige

We are pleased to announce that the latest version of the AeroFS client brings two long awaited features: version history and activity log.

Version History

Before diving into the details, it is very important to understand that this feature is not meant as a substitute for version control systems or backup solutions. In particular, this feature will only provide benefits for files that are shared on multiple devices (either through a shared folder or on several of your own devices).

Every time AeroFS syncs a file from a remote peer, it saves a copy of the current local version of the file to a special location, from which it can later be restored at your convenience. This addresses the unfortunate case where someone accidentally deletes a file on their computer, causing all users who shared it to lose access to it.

Old versions are periodically cleaned to keep the disk usage on your local devices to a reasonable level. In the future we plan to give you better control over the how frequently cleaning occurs but for the time being, the following heuristic is used:

• all versions are kept for at least 7 days
• if the space taken by old versions exceeds an acceptable threshold, a daily cleaning is performed to shrink down to 3/4 of that threshold

Accessing your version history

You have two ways of accessing your version history:

1. Click on the AeroFS icon in the taskbar to bring up the menu and select the “Version History…”
2. Navigate inside your AeroFS folder with Finder (OSX) or Explorer (Windows), right click on a file or folder and select the “Version History…” entry under the “AeroFS” menu.

On the left pane you can see a view of your AeroFS folder. If an item is grayed out it means it has been deleted but some old versions are still available.

Viewing and exporting old versions

When a file is selected in the left pane, the right pane will show a table of all the versions that are saved on this device. You can see the date and time at which each version was last modified and the size of the file at that time.

You can view the content of any version by double cliking on a row in that table or alternatively by clicking on the “Open” button under the table, which will open the currently selected version. A temporary, read-only copy of the file will be opened in the default application that recognizes this type of file.

If you want to recover one of the versions, simply select it in the table and click the “Save…” button or right click on the row of interest and select the “Save…” entry in the context menu. This will bring up a dialog in which you can select the location where the exported version should be stored. In most cases, if you just want to replace an old version in place of the current version the correct location will be automatically selected.

Restoring deleted files

When a folder is selected in the left pane, the right pane will offer you the option to restore the deleted files under that folder.

Again, in most cases you’ll just want to restore deleted files to their original location inside your AeroFS folder and the correct location will be automatically selected.

Please keep in mind that restoring a large number of deleted files may take some time.

Command Line Interface (CLI) support

Although the version history is primarily meant to be accessed through the graphical interface, this feature is also exposed through the command line interface.

CLI users can think of the version history as a parallel file system. They can list the content of the version tree using the newly introduced -h switch of the “ls” command:

$ aerofs-sh ls -l -h /path/of/interest
d- foo
-- bar 
-- baz

Once a file of interest is located inside the version tree, it is possible to list its versions with the newly introduced “vh” command:

$ aerofs-sh vh /path/of/interest
Version index           Size      Date
------------------------------------------------------
0_20120828_122014_136 | 1.24 KB | Aug 28 12:20 PM
0_20120828_130743_778 | 1.32 KB | Aug 28 1:07 PM
0_20120828_130756_792 | 1.33 KB | Aug 28 1:07 PM
0_20120828_130847_219 | 1.34 KB | Aug 28 1:08 PM
0_20120828_130909_447 | 1.34 KB | Aug 28 1:09 PM
0_20120830_172800_209 | 1.38 KB | Aug 30 5:28 PM
0_20120912_171229_000 | 1.34 KB | 5:12 PM

The output of this command is similar to the table of versions in the version history dialog above. The mysterious first field is a string used to identify different versions of the same file. Its format is specific to each storage backend (S3 and local storage use different ways to identify versions) and may change without notice between two versions of AeroFS.

Finally, to recover the contents of an old version, use the newly introduced “-h” switch of the export command:

$ aerofs-sh export -h 0_20120828_122014_136 path/of/interest ~/export/path

Activity Log

The activity log is a new feature meant to increase transparency and give you an accurate picture of who modified which files at what time. Every time AeroFS detects a change, whether as a result of a sync or a local modification, it now records a new entry in the activity log.

This activity log is local, which means that the content of the log will be different on all machines. For instance, when one modifies a file multiple times while being offline, the device on which the modifications are done will have several entry in the activity log. However other peers will only see a single entry for all these modifications when they next sync that file.

Viewing the Activity Log

To view the contents of the activity log, click on the AeroFS tray icon andbring your mouse over the “Recent activities” entry. This will list the most recent activities recorded on this device. Clicking on any of these items will show it in a file manager.

To get a more detailed account of activities, click on the “Show More…”entry, which will bring up the dialog below.

Each entry is associated with one or more users. If you are the user, then the name of the device on which the activity originated will also be shown. The activity entry describes which file was affected, what happened to it (creation, modification or deletion).

The time in the right column indicates when the local device became aware of the activity. For local modifications (indicated by “You on this computer”) it is the time at which the modification happened but for remote modifications it is the time at which a new version was synced.

Double clicking on an entry or clicking on the “Reveal File” button will again show the relevant file inside a file manager.

Command Line Interface support

The activity log can be viewed in the command line through the newly introduced “activities” command:

$ aerofs-sh activities

This command takes two optional parameters:

-c <count>  maximum number of recent activities to display (defaults to 5)
-b          display brief activity descriptions

We hope you enjoy these new features. As always, feel free to reach out to us at support@aerofs.com if you run into any issues.

Cheers,

Hugues & the AeroFS team

In mid-June we hit a major milestone with the release of AeroFS Beta. The beta release has many improvements that we are quite proud of:

• Personal integration with Amazon S3
• Simplified Sharing and Syncing
• Unlimited version history on local computers Cleaner UI across Mac/Windows/Linux
• Overall improvements to the syncing speed and performance

Because of the many changes between the Alpha and Beta versions, we had to ask users to re-invite friends/colleagues to share files with them. As such, in an effort to cause as few headaches as possible, we made the upgrade from Alpha to Beta optional. Until now.

It has now been three months since the release of the Beta, and as many of you have successfully made the switch from Alpha to Beta it is soon time for us to shut down the Alpha version altogether.

On October 1st we will be shutting down the AeroFS Alpha cloud sync servers, as well as the registration and login servers!  After this date, sharing, cloud back up, and invitations will no longer work with the Alpha version.

Checking your Version

Not sure which version you’re running? To check, simply click on the AeroFS Icon in the taskbar, and click Help->About AeroFS. If you see the (beta) next to the AeroFS version in the About menu, congratulations! You’re running the latest version.

Upgrading is Easy

Those of you who are not running the latest version should see an ‘Upgrade to AeroFS Beta’ menu item in the AeroFS Menu Bar.

Linux CLI users: please run $ aerofs-sh upgrade and follow instructions

If you don’t see the option to upgrade to beta, or have any problems installing AeroFS beta, please send us an email at support@aerofs.com.

UPDATE AS OF FEB 1, 2013

AeroFS/S3 Integration is now part of our Business offering, AeroFS Team Server. It is no longer a feature in the AeroFS desktop client. If you had enabled S3 with AeroFS already on your computer, you’re still good to go and this change will not affect you. This change affects new installations of AeroFS only.

Everyday we ask ourselves, what would make AeroFS more useful? One obvious answer to that question is “to let users sync AeroFS with their own Amazon S3 acounts.” So we made it happen. Today we bring you AeroFS with S3 integration! Coupled with our private syncing solution, S3’s high availability and durability makes AeroFS/S3 ideal for archiving important private data. Here are some great features of AeroFS/S3 that we think you would be excited about:  

To enable AeroFS/S3, simply install AeroFS on a Linux computer using the command line interface (aerofs-cli). During setup, input your S3 credentials, a bucket ID, and a encryption key when prompted. AeroFS/S3 runs in a headless non-interactive mode. That means that no ~/AeroFS folder will be created and the files will not be locally accessible on that machine. AeroFS/S3 is best used when coupled with at least one other device.

Cheers, Weihan & the AeroFS team

PS: By default, AeroFS uses SQLite databases to store metadata locally. We also support MySQL for database replication and backup. Contact us if this is what you need.

Hi Everyone,

I’d like to thank you all for your patience over the past few months while we’ve been busy quietly working away. Although we’ve tried addressing our quietness in a previous blog post, I’d like to take a moment to give you a more thorough update.

In the coming weeks we will be releasing a new version of AeroFS which is a culmination of a few months of tireless development work and provides quite a few improvements as well as important upgrades to the sharing model.

Simplified Sharing and Syncing

We’ve been working hard to simplify sharing and syncing, and we think we’ve done it!

As of the next release we are retiring the old “Library” model in favor of a simpler approach: In most cases, you can now share any folder or subfolder in AeroFS, not just the top folder! 

By default, all folders and files in your AeroFS will be synced between all of your devices. If you’d like to share a particular folder with someone, simply right-click on that folder and select AeroFS -> Share Folder and enter their email address (shared folders get a slightly different icon).

 

Unfortunately, because the new sharing model is so different from the old “Library” model, you will need to re-invite friends/colleagues to share files with you (all your shared data will remain intact). To make this process as convenient as possible, this latest update will not be applied automatically, but will be required before you can invite any new users to share files with you. 

Linux CLI users: please run “aerofs-sh upgrade” and follow instructions.

 

Many of you have been wondering why things have been quiet on our end. I’m going to take a few moments and put some speculations to rest

We are still VERY actively developing AeroFS. In fact, all of our resources are currently tied up in the development of the next major release. We think you’ll love it.

Unfortunately, our team is quite small (but we are hiring!) which has meant that while we’ve been super busy coding, we haven’t had much time to respond to support requests or provide timely updates. We sincerely apologize for that, and we’ll do our best to respond in a reasonable manner, but please bear with us through this period! 

In the mean time, if you have any questions/requests, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@aerofs.com

Best,

Yuri and the AeroFS Team

Building great software often requires standing on the shoulders of giants, and by giants we mean the Open Source community.

Of course, it is also often said that it is better to give than it is to receive, and in the spirit of the holidays we’re happy to announce our very first contribution to the Open Source community: GrowlJavaBindings, a library that makes it easier for Java developers to use the Growl notification system.

The main features are:

• Ability to display notifications even if Growl is not installed or not running.

• Compatibility with both Growl 1.3 and Growl 1.2.

If you’re a Java developer on Mac OS X and you’re using Growl, GrowlJavaBindings will make your life much easier. We’re releasing the code under the BSD license. Pull requests are welcome, and feel free to send any feedback to support@aerofs.com.

Greg & The AeroFS team