I used AeroFS a bunch for private stuff, and it was okayish, but never a really friendly product. I've since transitioned to Syncthing, which is open source (in Go) and actually has better UI in my opinion (at least for my usage).
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On an unrelated note, maybe there is something to this "open source (in Go)" phenomenon. I'm starting to think it's more than just a popularity contest, and has something to do with the engineer friendliness of Go.
Edit: But then I looked at syncthing's git repo and thought, nah!
I've actually found building Go (Syncthing, in particular) for the packaging system I use (Gentoo's Portage) a complete PITA, to the point where I don't understand how it can be so broken. And I'm not really a fan of the language itself. Still, people are building some nifty things with it, so there must be something they like!
Really? I'd be interested to know what sorts of issues you ran into. It's always been fairly trivial for me to make PKGBUILDs in Arch for projects that are built with Go.
What's wrong with their git repo?
One of the critical things for me is to have an easy user interface for non-technical people to use. Having a bookmark to manage your files/folders via a web interface seems… annoying, at best. Putting an icon in the menu bar seems more accessible, since people won't have to remember where it went, lose their bookmarks, wonder if it's running, etc.
Yeah, I agree it's currently not that great for non-technical people. Still, I'm excited that I finally have something that fulfills this need for something Dropbox-like but with my own storage that seems to get the job done (including syncing my 50 GB Lightroom collection!) with a UI that makes sense to myself, at least.
Syncthing-GTK works pretty well as an alternative to the web interface. Really should probably be advertised alongside their Android client.
My biggest problem with Syncthing is that I don't just want sync, I want a kind of backup built in as well, which Syncthing doesn't do (no support for cloud storage or zero knowledge storage hosts).
At the moment I'm paying for SpiderOak, which does this but another open source alternative that's getting there is Syncany[0], which supports a variety of cloud providers through plugins, versions all files and encrypts data.
There's also git-annex but its plugins aren't always high quality and usability is... Challenging.
syncany supports plain old SFTP, so you can back it up to rsync.net. Ask about the HN Readers discount...
rsync.net looks like a great service but it's just not really worth it to me at the moment, I just have too much data for it to be price effective.
With 800GB of data, I can send it to:
- SpiderOak: $130/year (1c/GB)
- Google Drive: $10/month (1c/GB)
- Dropbox $10/month (1c/GB)
- OneDrive $7/month (1c/GB)
- Amazon S3 $24/month (3c/GB)
- Google Cloud Storage $16/$8/month (2c/GB standard or 1c/GB Nearline)
- Rsync.net $160/month (20c/GB)
And that's not even taking the backup providers into account.
I definitely see where rsync.net would shine for business users because it looks like you have great support but for a regular guy who wants to backup his few hundred GB of photos and sync some files it doesn't make much sense.