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Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having seve

by _slwy 10y ago

Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading. However I noticed something odd. According to my Mac's activity monitor, SpiderOak was only uploading in short bursts [0] of ~2MB/s. I did some test uploads to other services (Google Drive, Amazon) to verify that things were fine with my connection (they were) and then contacted support (Feb 10). What followed was nearly __6 months__ of "support", first claiming that it might be a server side issue and moving me "to a new host" (Feb 17) then when that didn't resolve my issue, they ignored me for a couple of months then handed me over to an engineer (Apr 28) who told me: "we may have your uploads running at the maximum speed we can offer you at the moment. Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading" At this point I ran a basic test (cat /dev/urandom | gzip -c | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass pass:spideroak | pv | shasum -a 256 > /dev/zero) that showed my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it (Apr 30) after which I was simply ignored for a full month until I opened another ticket asking for a refund (Jul 9). I really love the idea of secure, private storage but SpiderOak's client is barely functional and their customer support is rather bad.

elementalest 10y ago
I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well. SO has no UI means to control version history. In order to limit version history (for example, to hourly versions per day, then 1 per day for a month, then 1 per week indefinitely), I need to run a script to close SO and run SO with some command line arguments. Having this functionality available in the UI would be nice. The SO UI is slow to use. Over 6 years I have accumulated a lot of files and whenever I goto the manage tab to browse my files, it can take several seconds each time I expand tree nodes. The UI also becomes unresponsive, making browsing files take a while. Manually deleting files/folders/version history is an absolute pain. Often, when deleting a folder in SO, only some of the contents are deleted, taking multiple attempts to delete. In some cases the contents of the folder disappear, but it shows root locations of drives as contents of the folder. When deleting anything, the UI becomes unresponsive for upwards of 30s, often significantly more for large folders or many version histories. Even selecting multiple files can take several seconds where the UI is unresponsive, the more files you select, the longer it becomes unresponsive. This makes file management take forever. If I move a file temporarily, SO assumes it has been deleted and moves it to the 'Deleted items' folder. However, when I move the file back, SO create a new version of that file, leaving all version history in the deleted folder. It does not recognise the files are the same. This means that if a file is created and deleted numerous times (compiling pdf, or binary), hundreds of files with the same name are added to the 'Deleted items' folder. SO should be able to recognise the files are linked (perhaps checking the similarity of the files, only rejecting a link if they are more than 75% different) and create version histories instead of new files. There is also no way to delete items in the 'Deleted items' folder after a period of time (2 years for example). The only way to delete items is to manually do it or clear everything, which I don't want to do as there are version histories that should be linked to currently existing files in the 'Deleted items' folder. I have had to resort to once a year putting a movie on and just manually going through folders for a few hours. I really like the idea of SpiderOak, but it really is a poor implementation and just an all round pain to use. In the past I havn't minded waiting for new features and fixes, but its been 1.5 years since the new UI and nothing much has changed. EDIT: And just to prove my point, I just tried to deleted a folder in the 'Deleted items' folder. The first attempt deleted everything within the folder, but a 'c:/' item appeared inside it. So I deleted the folder again. Half the contents of the folder a level above it just disappeared. This has happened before. I think I give up.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  The thing is that there's nothing actually special about SpiderOak as a service. Since the data is encrypted end to end, the only special thing is the client and as you've pointed out, there's is terrible. On that note, once I gave up on SpiderOak I went looking for alternatives and they actually exist: - Syncany: https://www.syncany.org/ https://www.syncany.org/ - Java based, works on Windows and *NIX, uses S3, Dropbox, Flickr, FTP, Openstack Swift, SFTP and WebDAV as backends. - Rclone: http://rclone.org http://rclone.org - Go based, works on everything Go supports, uses Google Drive, S3, Swift, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon Drive, OneDrive, hubiC, Backblaze B2 and Yandex.Disk. Syncany at least supports limited file versioning but not as granular as you seem to be after. The upside is that unlike SpiderOak, Syncany is open source and you can contribute features you want. If you're only after backup, there's also Borg which might work for you: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.
  - elementalest 10y ago
    I looked at Syncany, but it looks like the project is dead: > The core team of Syncany is on hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. Feel free to do with the code what the license allows and encourages, but please don't expect any maintenance. The team thanks everyone who has contributed to Syncany in one way or another. rclone doesn't really have the features i'm looking for. I have however found Duplicati: http://www.duplicati.com http://www.duplicati.com, which looks like it might serve my needs.
conta 10y ago
I have to agree that SpiderOak is terrible. Whenever I try to run it, my Mac goes crap. Everything seems to be freezing and OS is not usable at all. Indeed it seems that they are moving to another products...

by _slwy 10y ago

elementalest 10y ago

I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well. SO has no UI means to control version history. In order to limit version history (for example, to hourly versions per day, then 1 per day for a month, then 1 per week indefinitely), I need to run a script to close SO and run SO with some command line arguments. Having this functionality available in the UI would be nice. The SO UI is slow to use. Over 6 years I have accumulated a lot of files and whenever I goto the manage tab to browse my files, it can take several seconds each time I expand tree nodes. The UI also becomes unresponsive, making browsing files take a while. Manually deleting files/folders/version history is an absolute pain. Often, when deleting a folder in SO, only some of the contents are deleted, taking multiple attempts to delete. In some cases the contents of the folder disappear, but it shows root locations of drives as contents of the folder. When deleting anything, the UI becomes unresponsive for upwards of 30s, often significantly more for large folders or many version histories. Even selecting multiple files can take several seconds where the UI is unresponsive, the more files you select, the longer it becomes unresponsive. This makes file management take forever. If I move a file temporarily, SO assumes it has been deleted and moves it to the 'Deleted items' folder. However, when I move the file back, SO create a new version of that file, leaving all version history in the deleted folder. It does not recognise the files are the same. This means that if a file is created and deleted numerous times (compiling pdf, or binary), hundreds of files with the same name are added to the 'Deleted items' folder. SO should be able to recognise the files are linked (perhaps checking the similarity of the files, only rejecting a link if they are more than 75% different) and create version histories instead of new files. There is also no way to delete items in the 'Deleted items' folder after a period of time (2 years for example). The only way to delete items is to manually do it or clear everything, which I don't want to do as there are version histories that should be linked to currently existing files in the 'Deleted items' folder. I have had to resort to once a year putting a movie on and just manually going through folders for a few hours. I really like the idea of SpiderOak, but it really is a poor implementation and just an all round pain to use. In the past I havn't minded waiting for new features and fixes, but its been 1.5 years since the new UI and nothing much has changed. EDIT: And just to prove my point, I just tried to deleted a folder in the 'Deleted items' folder. The first attempt deleted everything within the folder, but a 'c:/' item appeared inside it. So I deleted the folder again. Half the contents of the folder a level above it just disappeared. This has happened before. I think I give up.

Veratyr 10y ago
The thing is that there's nothing actually special about SpiderOak as a service. Since the data is encrypted end to end, the only special thing is the client and as you've pointed out, there's is terrible. On that note, once I gave up on SpiderOak I went looking for alternatives and they actually exist: - Syncany: https://www.syncany.org/ https://www.syncany.org/ - Java based, works on Windows and *NIX, uses S3, Dropbox, Flickr, FTP, Openstack Swift, SFTP and WebDAV as backends. - Rclone: http://rclone.org http://rclone.org - Go based, works on everything Go supports, uses Google Drive, S3, Swift, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon Drive, OneDrive, hubiC, Backblaze B2 and Yandex.Disk. Syncany at least supports limited file versioning but not as granular as you seem to be after. The upside is that unlike SpiderOak, Syncany is open source and you can contribute features you want. If you're only after backup, there's also Borg which might work for you: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.
- elementalest 10y ago
  I looked at Syncany, but it looks like the project is dead: > The core team of Syncany is on hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. Feel free to do with the code what the license allows and encourages, but please don't expect any maintenance. The team thanks everyone who has contributed to Syncany in one way or another. rclone doesn't really have the features i'm looking for. I have however found Duplicati: http://www.duplicati.com http://www.duplicati.com, which looks like it might serve my needs.

conta 10y ago

I have to agree that SpiderOak is terrible. Whenever I try to run it, my Mac goes crap. Everything seems to be freezing and OS is not usable at all. Indeed it seems that they are moving to another products...