Spideroak One Backup

Why you need something like this

• You should have a good system for backing up your data
• Despite what you might think, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc. aren't good services to use for backup.
• Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc. aren't very secure and nothing like as private as you deserve.

Why SpiderOak is different (to mainstream services)

Because Dropbox and their ilk use encryption "at rest" only (ie you send them your data, then they encrypt it using keys _they_have). That means they can de-crypt your data, read it, pass it on to others. That means requests for your data from government surveillance agencies become matters of legal dispute. With Spideroak, giving up your data is only a matter of technological impossibility.

Spideroak encrypts your data on your computer, then sends it to their servers. They don't know your passwords, can't read your data. Nice. (Well... they can see what folders you have. But not the files.) What this means is that 1) your data is far more private, 2) if a hacker hacks their servers, it's ok. Because all the hacker will get is stuff he/she can't read.

Spideroak also protects you against ransomware, nasty software that might infect your computer, encrypt your data with its own password and hold it hostage until you pay to get it unlocked. If you have Spideroak, this is no problem. You can restore your data from a version just before the ransomware struck. Easy peasy.

Spideroak's competitors

Key to Spideroak's model is the idea that you hold the key to the encryption. (Don't lose them; use a password manager like Bitwarden to generate and remember it.) Spideroak's competitors in this field are companies that have a "zero-knowledge" architecture (they don't know/can't know what your files are) and therefore can't be compelled to give it away/lose it. They include Sync.com and Tresorit. You can also use Cryptomator to encrypt files before sending them to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

Good stuff

• Spideroak's prices are reasonable. Maybe even good.
• Supports Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile!
• Share your files with the outside world via a room (you publish a folder online), and let people download files as you put them in a folder. You can password protect shared rooms. Nice.
• Backup and sync! Yay!
• Spideroak supports open source software (e.g. encryptr)

Not so good

• Really clunky, outdated interface. Takes quite a while to get used to, and it has been a long time ago that it should have been made more user-friendly.
• No second-factor authentication (the security could be better)... this more than anything is the reason I'm shaving a star off my review.
• Can't upload files from the mobile app (Tresorit and Sync.com are much better here).

Bottom line:

• Don't have a backup option? Get Spideroak.
• Think Google Drive or Dropbox will save you from malware? They won't. Get Spideroak (or Tresorit, if you can afford it.)
• One of the drawbacks I listed above a problem? Try Tresorit, Sync.com or Cryptomator.

Use something like todo-backup to backup your files if you setup syncs using Spider-oak. Spider-oak syncing is slow as molasses. I signed up for 100 gigs and synced up 'my documents' across 3 computers. I installed a new hard drive on my laptop and restored the sync. Of course it took days to sync up, in fact it's still working on it, I'm used to that slowness already. But over 2 days Spideroak systematically deleted 62036 files and 7150 folders, because the laptop didn't have all the files and folders, it decided that I must have deleted everything.

I went into the recycle bin in Spideroak to look for my files and folders, they were there, but there is no way to sort by date deleted column. At the very least, you should have a way to sort by date deleted to make recovering from these disasters not take a full week of plodding through each and ever folder and subfolder.

Luckily I used another product to backup and it was easy to restore the files. Using spideroak recycle bin would have been a mind-numbingly slow and cumbersome process. The warning about 'exact file structure' when restoring a sync needs to be clarified, why can't it just say 'if you have some folders and files missing on this new pc we are going to delete them from all your other pc's"