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• Really clunky, outdated interface.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"

Everything just works. All important information is covered on their website and support has even answered technical questions for me. It passed every scenario I tested. The features I love are:
-It actually works !!!
-Zero knowledge
-Delta upload (only upload blocks that have changed)
-Deduplication (multiple same files only take the space of 1 file)
-File sharing whitout losing "zero knowledge" of non-shared data thanks to scoped encryption keys.
-Can be set to ask for password at startup

Spectacular service. I was turned off at first by the proprietary nature of the interface, but after years of experience with backup programs, including a very difficult and expensive case of Jungle Disk cancer, I can confidently say SpiderOak is the way to go. The best. When I came back to SpiderOak after years of not using it, it still had my old encrypted backups waiting for me. For free. Now I am a happy paying customer, backing up all of my many devices to it, and I hope this continues till I die of very old age in my sleep.

Having tried to use SpiderOak One on both mac and win for the past eight months or so, I am very disappointed in it. Several times, I have had to recover a mac that had run out of disk space, only to discover the SpiderOak software was using 40GB of disk on a laptop that only was backing up about 8GB.

When I have tried to do recoveries, the one time I really needed the product to work, I couldn't recover my files because there was an unreported database corruption on another host associated with my account, not one holding files I needed to recover. Turns out, much of these problems are design flaws, not just coding issues that could be ironed out in a future release. I finally (after several days) got someone who gave more than stock answers, and a procedure that allowed me to recover the files that I needed.

The interface is oriented toward backing up only selected well known parts of your home directory. Not what I always want.

After losing over fifteen hours in a recovery because I couldn't actually recover my files in a sane manner, I realize that I too, am looking for an alternative.