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

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

In case you wonder what we’ve been up to: We are currently undergoing several architectural changes which we hope will bring AeroFS’s performance and user experience to the next level:

1. New core algorithms that will speed up synchronization, and substantially reduce network traffic, CPU usage, and metadata requests during idle time.

2. Techniques that will automatically resolve conflicts and remove duplicate files in many use cases. They will also eliminate redundant transfers.

 3. A major improvement in the networking stack that will boost transfer speed significantly in some over-the-Internet and intra-LAN transfer cases.

4. A major overhaul on the front end for a more fluent user experience.

As the entire team is currently driving in full speed towards these goals, we may be a bit slow in responding to support tickets as well as sending out more beta invites. Stay tuned. We hope to bring kegs of beer with even greater flavors when we come back!

Weihan & The Team

To say that the past year has been pretty wild is putting it mildly.

On July 22nd, 2010 we posted our “We may be late to the party, but we brought a keg” post. That post got a lot of love on HackerNews, and gave us the confidence boost we needed to keep going. We were half way through the Summer 2010 YCombinator program and were making difficult decisions on product, fit, and direction. 
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Hello everyone,

Today is the first of March, the third month of 2011, and so we would like to give you guys some updates. 

As of today, the following changes are officially live across all three of our officially supported platforms: 

• **Folder Sync – **AeroFS no longer requires a virtual drive to synchronize files. Any libraries you create starting today going forward will be created locally. On Windows, they will appear under My Documents/AeroFS. On Linux and Mac they will appear under ~/AeroFS. For existing installations, the drive will continue to be enabled for the next few versions, allowing you to migrate your files easily to the new location.
• Selective Sync - Some of you have expressed that you may not want to sync all libraries on all devices. We’ve now implemented that feature in an opt-out fashion. By default, all your computers will automatically join a new library when it is created, but by visiting the control panel of a particular device you’ll be able to opt that machine out of any library it is a member of. Additionally, if you want to disable a computer from automatically joining a newly created library, this is also possible by visiting the Control Panel. 
• Although this is not a direct feature, we’ve also drastically increased stability and performance!

Additionally, as of today our team has grown from two engineers to three. Our newest member, Allen, is joining us from Toronto and will be contributing to all things AeroFS related. We’re incredibly excited to have him on board and he’s already hard at work making AeroFS better for you.

Finally, and probably what most of you reading this are hoping to hear: We’re releasing another set of invitations today, so check your emails! 

Cheers,

The AeroFS Team

Yuri, Weihan, and Allen

P.S. Appropriatelly, the preferred beer to go with this post is

Well, this has been quite the ride. 

Over the past six months we’ve received a lot of feedback, support, advice, and well wishes from people observing our progress. We’ve been quiet, some say too quiet, with updates; but only because we’ve been busy working and supporting our early alpha users. 

After AeroFS ended up on the front page of HackerNews again two weeks ago (thank you for the submission, Vince!), We decided it was time to step up our efforts in communication outside of our alpha users.

This week we’ve released a new update for AeroFS, EA8.3 (to those curious, the ‘EA’ stands for External Alpha, 8 is the major build number, and 3 is the minor build number).

This release is a milestone for us because as of today we “fully” support three major platforms:

• Microsoft’s Windows XP, Vista, 7 (32 and 64bit)
• Apple’s OSX Leopard AND Snow Leopard (with experimental support for 64bit kernels)
• Ubuntu 8.04+ (32bit and 64bit)
• Unofficial support for other 32bit/64bit linux platforms is also available, but your milage may vary.

We’ve been communicating with Alpha users on a regular basis to try and iron out issues with the user interface, the user experience, and the overall feel of the product. Using your feedback, we’ve revamped the control panel three times (oldest to newest is from first to last): 

Beyond the UI improvements, many of you should notice significant improvements in the syncing algorithm itself, with much better throughput possible on both the LAN and over the Internet. (In fact, many of you have mentioned that you’d actually like to *throttle *the speed with which uploads/downloads happen. This is on our to do list . 

Perhaps one of the most common questions we’ve heard is “Where is my invite?”. From day one of our alpha launch, our policy has been to make sure that any future user has a better experience than the previous user had at the point of their invitation. This means we release invites in small batches and wait for the user feedback to come through from a fresh set of eyes, as well as from existing users. Yes, it is true that many of you who have signed up six months ago still don’t have an invitation, but that number should be rapidly shrinking to zero  in the next few weeks, and if you’ve signed up in the last two weeks: don’t worry, it won’t take us another six months to get to you, promise!

There’s still a lot of work for us to do, but today we’re going to be releasing our largest single batch of invitations to date, so check your emails to see if you got one! 

As this year draws to an end, We would love to wish everyone a very happy holiday season, a merry Christmas to those celebrating, and a happy new year!

See you in 2011! 

Yuri

P.S. To those wondering, These are my favourite (and the best) holiday brewed beers on the market: 

(courtesy of photobucket) 

To say that the file syncing and collaboration market is “noisy” is an understatement at best. It seems like almost every day a new startup or product pops up that offers file syncing and backup. Generally, these tools work quite well: in the case of file syncing, you place your files in a designated folder or drive where the application can find them. Any file placed under the designated folder/drive will then be uploaded somewhere in the cloud and also distributed to your other devices. 

AeroFS is designed to let you go beyond simple file syncing and collaboration. You own devices with vast amounts of storage available (e.g. laptops, desktops), yet you are forced to rely on third party cloud technologies to sync and share files between them. Cloud-based syncing and sharing works well for small personal documents and limited media, but breaks down when we talk about use cases such as:

• Businesses sharing and collaborating on sensitive contracts and documents, where control over your data is truly important
• Sharing vast amounts of rich media (think hundreds of gigabytes), where cloud storage costs grow rapidly

To address these issues, we’ve designed AeroFS to be completely decentralized. You can sync files between any two (or more!) devices with or without Internet access, over a LAN, and behind a firewall. Your files do not need to be uploaded to the cloud, so you will retain full control of your data. 

Of course, sometimes you want to store your files in the cloud (off site backup, better availability, or because you’re hip like that). No problemo! To us, the “cloud” is just another peer, so if you want to share your files in the cloud, you can easily do so. We just want to make sure that you have the choice over where your data is stored. 

There are some other cool things that AeroFS can do that are simply impossible with centralized solutions, but I will save these for another blog post.

AeroFS is currently in a semi-private alpha/beta development phase. What this means is that we’re rolling out invites as fast as we can, but at a rate that lets us deal with the feedback that you give us. If you’re interested in giving it a try, head over to the signup page and we’ll give you an invitation within a few days!