8 ms·

I still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful. I'll

by _cxqp 10y ago

I still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful. I'll post my usual story: In February 2016, 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. If you want a service like theirs, I'd suggest rolling your own. Rclone [1] and Syncany [2] are both open source and support end to end encryption and a variety of storage backends. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/XEvhIop.png http://i.imgur.com/XEvhIop.png [1]: http://rclone.org/ http://rclone.org/ [2]: https://www.syncany.org/ https://www.syncany.org/

BadassFractal 10y ago
Would you say those two last tools are the best option as of today as far as using open source to conveniently store zero knowledge bits on S3? Haven't looked into the space much before but I'd gladly get rid of spideroak if I could self host it.
- tmikaeld 10y ago
  Check Duplicati, it's based on duplicity. https://www.duplicati.com https://www.duplicati.com http://duplicity.nongnu.org http://duplicity.nongnu.org
  - ar0 10y ago
    Will second that. I've been using the OS X build of Duplicati for a while now to backup via SCP and it works flawlessly. And, yes, I did test restoring some files from time to time with it. Note that the new "Duplicati 2.0" is no longer based on duplicity as far as I understand but a complete rewrite. It also uses a completely different backup architecture which should avoid / lessen the need for regular "full backups". I backup to a 1 TB storage VPS from time4vps.eu, which at 72 EUR for two years is also much cheaper than Crashplan which I used before (and which seemed to be far more resource hungry on my Mac). Only downside of Duplicati in my opinion is that it performs daily backups not "real-time" backups as some others do. On the other hand, the post above asks for a "full service solution", in that case I would probably still recommend CrashPlan - it also supports local encryption with your own encryption keys and has been very reliable for me as well.
    - Strom 10y ago
      Wow, time4vps.eu is even cheaper than hetzner for storage. Definitely going to be testing them out for my cloud storage needs.
      - tmikaeld 10y ago
        They are not, check out Hubic - 10TB for 49€ year
        Strom 10y ago
        Hubic may be interesting for personal use but it's unsuitable for commercial use, which is my actual goal. I need something which I can buy in bulk and scales into PB range. For example the hubic contract [1] states that bandwidth is limited to 10 Mbit/s upstream and downstream. Compare this to 400 Mbps dedicated port speed for each Storage server at time4vps.eu. Indeed, time4vps.eu offers 32 TB of bandwidth per month with the 4 TB storage plan, while hubic's 10 Mbit/s means that even if I transfer 24/7 for the whole month I'll only be able to transfer 3.3 TB of the 10 TB they offer. For heavy personal use something like Amazon Drive [2] is probably a better choice, because it offers unlimited storage for $60/year. People on reddit are saying they have hundreds of TBs stored with no complaints. -- [1] https://hubic.com/en/contracts/Contrat_hubiC_2014.pdf https://hubic.com/en/contracts/Contrat_hubiC_2014.pdf [2] https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/ https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/
tristor 10y ago
I've been a SpiderOak customer since 2011. Long story short, I agree that performance is slow to the point of abysmal. What I will say though is I have yet to find any alternative that is a complete package solution that comes even close to matching what SpiderOak currently offers. On servers I tend to use etckeeper + tarsnap, but on the go traveling around the world I need a client-focused cloud backup solution with serious security, and frankly nothing else exists that I've found. If you have a realistic option (e.g. a fully supported solution) from another provider I'm all ears, but frankly SpiderOak has been good in that they have lost 0 data for me and have been able to successfully restore several times. If they could just double or triple the speed for uploading it'd be a huge boon to me, but realistically most of the places I've gone in the world being able to upload 2MB/s is faster than my local Internet is capable of.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Have you looked at Arq? (Blatantly assuming you use Mac or Windows.) https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com
  - tristor 10y ago
    I've looked into Borg/Attic as well. My main hang-up is where to put the repository and what my long-term storage costs would be. Right now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a terabyte of stuff backed up (mostly my Lightroom catalog). I need to be able to generate and access these backups from anywhere in the works reliably. I think Borg would be a great solution for my use at home where I have a NAS on my LAN to provide local storage for the repository. But while traveling the world with my MacBook it doesn't cut it. Arq looks good from that angle but I think would quickly cause my costs to overrun me. Having good backups is what gives me the confidence as a photographer to overcome my inner pack rat. Without good backups I'd never be able to ruthlessly delete images from my collection that don't exceed "okay" into "great". But because I know my images are backed up effectively forever I can really be honest in my art.
    - lobster_johnson 10y ago
nyolfen 10y ago
as far as free alternatives, i saw no mention yet of borg[0]/borgmatic[1], which i quite like -- think 'rsync with encryption and pruning'. [0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [1] https://github.com/witten/borgmatic https://github.com/witten/borgmatic
- rsync 10y ago
  Ignore. Deleted. I thought the linked-to article was from a third party. Please enjoy HN frontpage without our butting in.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  The problem with Borg is that it requires an actual mounted FS or SSH (with a live mounted FS on the other end). You can't just point it at offline storage. Totally a great option if you do have live storage to backup to but personally I don't have a full server worth of disk spare at any given time.
rarrrrrr 10y ago
After looking through our records, I think perhaps you might mean 2015 instead of 2016. I took over the company that year and some things have changed. At the time customer satisfaction ratings were around 84%, and we're in the high 90s now. If I've found the correct case, we did at least suspend billing when the issue started and eventually issued a full refund. I'm sorry we weren't able to determine the cause of the slowness for you. Troubleshooting an end-to-end encrypted product is hard because you can't just see everything that's happening by looking at the server. We have seen ISPs deny or aggressively throttle connections to our destination networks. Palo Alto firewalls classify traffic to SpiderOak as an online backup service and often block it outright or put it at least priority. I'm not saying that these were necessarily the causes in your situation. SpiderOak keeps improving and the 2017 road map is action packed. If for some reason you would ever like to try SpiderOak again on me, you're welcome to contact me directly, or write to support@spideroak.com where these days we do a pretty good job of taking care of everyone. Otherwise I'm glad you've found backup solutions you're happy with. Cheers!
- hluska 10y ago
  Let me see if I have this straight. In response to a story from a customer, you went through all of your records and then shared information about the case in public. I'm glad your customer satisfaction scores are higher, but I'd rather not share any of my information with you. I'm not the op, but if I was, I would feel rather violated.
  - tjallingt 10y ago
    All he said was that they refunded the guy, seems like information that is pretty OK to share publicly especially in response to the claim that their customer support was terrible. In addition to that the person who commented shared a large amount of information about the support ticket themselves so it seems like they are fine with sharing at least that much information about this case. All-in-all this hardly seems like a reason to feel "violated"...
  - rarrrrrr 10y ago
    Thank you for the feedback. I'm sensitive to this issue too. For what it's worth, we do have very strict policy about what information regular customer service staff can access or share publicly (i.e. none in most cases) and how someone who calls in must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they really are the original customer before we will communicate with them. We're very careful about allowing any customer data to exist in 3rd party systems. We don't even use Google Analytics. https://medium.com/@mccamon/yeah-we-ditched-google-2fa644578964 https://medium.com/@mccamon/yeah-we-ditched-google-2fa644578... That said, many people also expect customer support delivered over Twitter so some flexibility is required. In this case I made a judgement call and decided to answer.
ar-jan 10y ago
For rolling your own, I would also highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/restic
- Freaky 10y ago
  Note: no support for compression. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21
tedmiston 10y ago
> I still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful. Unreliable and slow completely describes my experience with both Backblaze (lost the data for one of my drives which unfortunately I learned after the drive failed) and Crashplan (the Java client brings my rMBP to a crawl when it runs). There has got to be a decent online backup service that's reliable, reasonably priced, and respectful of resources out there somewhere. Two that have been recommended to me recently that I haven't tried yet but would like to are Arq Backup [1] and Tarsnap [2]. [1]: https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ [2]: http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  As a counter point my experience with Backblaze has been perfect. Been using it since it first came out I think, backs data up relatively fast, and when my drive failed they shipped me a USB drive with all of my data in a day or two (and I believe it came from US > UK so that's pretty impressive). At $5 a month for unlimited I haven't even thought of switching. I believe - although I could be wrong - they also encrypt the dat and give you the option of managing the keys so they don't have access.
  - red0point 10y ago
    Just clarifying on that encryption bit - they do indeed encrypt the data, but when restoring (e.g. logging into the web view & selecting files to restore) you're handing over your passphrase in plain text, as the decryption is done on their side.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      Also if you need to do an "extreme" restore beyond what's available in the web app, Backblaze requires you to give them your password in plaintext via email and if you use a private key to additionally either share that in plain text via email or disable it. Of course, I changed to a temporary password but nonetheless this was an extremely concerning experience to me as a security-conscious person. Backblaze is great until you actually have to do a restore. They are a huge company and could use secure channels if they wanted to.
rsync 10y ago
Ignore. Deleted. I thought the linked-to article was from a third party. Please enjoy HN frontpage without our butting in.
- zda 10y ago
  Is info@ the best email address to reach you? I didn't get a reply when I tried a few months ago.
  - rsync 10y ago
    Yes, info@. Check your spam folder - I can't imagine we'd miss an email there ... Either way, send an email today - we'll be watching.
peterwwillis 10y ago
I don't buy remote hosted storage, so when I saw $12/month for 1TB I was like "whoa, that's way too cheap to be reliable". Then I looked up other services, and some are as low as $4-$5/month for "unlimited" data, with some others being significantly more expensive. It seems to me these providers are basically a web hoster that specializes in storage, which means 24/7 support, very high uptime, capital investment in infrastructure and ongoing maintenance and planned upgrades, and technical specialization for writing and supporting custom software. Many web hosters get away with low prices by not guaranteeing data integrity and putting a premium on large amounts of storage (or simply over-selling capacity). It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month. For just photos, I would buy the second or third to cheapest option and be done with it, but it still gives me the willies that these prices are so low. The prices of different providers seems almost spastic, running from $1.50 to $150 for a terabyte of backup. Unless there's very good reasons for the variance in price, something seems fishy.
- schoen 10y ago
  > It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month. Some of them (I remember Tarsnap's page about this) outsource the storage itself to AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ $12 per TB per month would give a slight profit margin on the S3 Standard - Infrequent Access class (currently, a profit of about $2.20 per TB per month) and a significant profit margin on Glacier (about $10.90), with an appreciable loss (about $6.50) if the average customer block exceeded the Infrequent Access restrictions. It might be possible to make the client optimize accesses in some way that makes it less likely that many blocks will exceed Infrequent Access rules, and maybe even to try to keep the typical block in Glacier instead? https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#sia_anchor https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#sia_anchor It seems like an interesting challenge. (Yes, support and administrative costs need to come out of that profit margin.) Also, Amazon apparently offers "lifecycle policies" to try to do this automatically instead of explicitly. It seems like those policies try to migrate blocks into a cheaper tier that assumes less frequent access if the blocks have not, in fact, been accessed on a certain schedule. A cloud storage vendor using AWS as its backend could then try to optimize manually at the per-user level, or just let AWS do it itself empirically, which wouldn't save quite as much money as correct guesses about what particular users will do with particular data, but would require minimal engineering effort on the vendor's part. Edit: It seems like it will be hard to compete with the AWS/S3 backend for this kind of service! Now I wonder if there are providers who are known not to use S3.
jgmjgm 10y ago
I totally agree. Just a couple of months ago I had to dump them. Support was awful. This was my experience: When I purchased my SpiderOak account everything seemed to be going well. The service is twice as expensive as BackBlaze and CrashPlan but has better security. The software UI is also quite intuitive. The only problem was the support. A couple of weeks into my subscription my client died. I’d try to restart it and it would die again. I looked into the problem and then I emailed support at SpiderOak. Then I waited. Then I got an email from someone at SpiderOak saying that an ad campaign really paid off and they were signing up a lot of clients. They’d get back to me. They never did. I sent other emails. Sent my log files in. I was very, very polite. Over a week went by. Finally, I asked told them I’d really rather not work with them any more. More time went by. Finally, someone got back to me. They gave me instructions on how to cancel my account. They said they were sorry but they understood. Then they also told me how to fix my original problem. I would have stayed with SpiderOak if they had done something, anything more than that. I realize margins are tight but surely they could have thought a little bit about how to give me some confidence in their support. Instead, I was left with the distinct impression that their support staff is either chronically understaffed, under qualified or just doesn’t give a damn. Either way, it made me realize that this was not a company I could count on if something really went wrong.
elementalest 10y ago
My experience with spideroak has overall been very poor as I discussed in a previous thread on HN [1]. I have since moved away from spideroak and am using duplicati [2]. Honestly, things have been much better since then. I have not had any issues, and whats more, duplicati is free and open source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306745 [2] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/
hvidgaard 10y ago
Shameless plug. Not because I'm affiliated, but because I really like the product. Arc Backup. It's not cheap, and it doesn't include any storage, but you get a good client, and you can choose the storage you want. Most of the popular cloud providers are supported.
msh 10y ago
I have been using spideroak for a couple of years. I agree its slow compared to other providers, but its seems reliable to me, both what it uploads and testing restores. Right now I have a small backup selection (around 90 gigs) but most of the time I had been running with a approx 800 gigabyte backup set on my mac and except for slow initial upload (I am located in europe so that might also factor in) everything have been running fine.
chmars 10y ago
That reminds me of CrashPlan. They throttle uploads and deny it – and they have been promising a native Mac client for years. Scanning of new / changed data is rather slow too. I was testing SpiderOak two or three years ago. The client was awful but slightly less awful than CrashPlan's Java-based client. These days, I use a mix of Backblaze and Arq (with Amazon Cloud Drive). Backblaze is great but versioning is limited to 30 days. More versioning is probably not feasible, i.e., other cloud backup providers with unlimited versioning have to find other ways to keep their data usage under control.
wsha 10y ago
Syncanny development appears to be on indefinite hiatus, so it's not something I would want to trust my backups with.

by _cxqp 10y ago

BadassFractal 10y ago

Would you say those two last tools are the best option as of today as far as using open source to conveniently store zero knowledge bits on S3? Haven't looked into the space much before but I'd gladly get rid of spideroak if I could self host it.

tmikaeld 10y ago
Check Duplicati, it's based on duplicity. https://www.duplicati.com https://www.duplicati.com http://duplicity.nongnu.org http://duplicity.nongnu.org
- ar0 10y ago
  Will second that. I've been using the OS X build of Duplicati for a while now to backup via SCP and it works flawlessly. And, yes, I did test restoring some files from time to time with it. Note that the new "Duplicati 2.0" is no longer based on duplicity as far as I understand but a complete rewrite. It also uses a completely different backup architecture which should avoid / lessen the need for regular "full backups". I backup to a 1 TB storage VPS from time4vps.eu, which at 72 EUR for two years is also much cheaper than Crashplan which I used before (and which seemed to be far more resource hungry on my Mac). Only downside of Duplicati in my opinion is that it performs daily backups not "real-time" backups as some others do. On the other hand, the post above asks for a "full service solution", in that case I would probably still recommend CrashPlan - it also supports local encryption with your own encryption keys and has been very reliable for me as well.
  - Strom 10y ago
    Wow, time4vps.eu is even cheaper than hetzner for storage. Definitely going to be testing them out for my cloud storage needs.
    - tmikaeld 10y ago
      They are not, check out Hubic - 10TB for 49€ year
      - Strom 10y ago
        Hubic may be interesting for personal use but it's unsuitable for commercial use, which is my actual goal. I need something which I can buy in bulk and scales into PB range. For example the hubic contract [1] states that bandwidth is limited to 10 Mbit/s upstream and downstream. Compare this to 400 Mbps dedicated port speed for each Storage server at time4vps.eu. Indeed, time4vps.eu offers 32 TB of bandwidth per month with the 4 TB storage plan, while hubic's 10 Mbit/s means that even if I transfer 24/7 for the whole month I'll only be able to transfer 3.3 TB of the 10 TB they offer. For heavy personal use something like Amazon Drive [2] is probably a better choice, because it offers unlimited storage for $60/year. People on reddit are saying they have hundreds of TBs stored with no complaints. -- [1] https://hubic.com/en/contracts/Contrat_hubiC_2014.pdf https://hubic.com/en/contracts/Contrat_hubiC_2014.pdf [2] https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/ https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/

tristor 10y ago

I've been a SpiderOak customer since 2011. Long story short, I agree that performance is slow to the point of abysmal. What I will say though is I have yet to find any alternative that is a complete package solution that comes even close to matching what SpiderOak currently offers. On servers I tend to use etckeeper + tarsnap, but on the go traveling around the world I need a client-focused cloud backup solution with serious security, and frankly nothing else exists that I've found. If you have a realistic option (e.g. a fully supported solution) from another provider I'm all ears, but frankly SpiderOak has been good in that they have lost 0 data for me and have been able to successfully restore several times. If they could just double or triple the speed for uploading it'd be a huge boon to me, but realistically most of the places I've gone in the world being able to upload 2MB/s is faster than my local Internet is capable of.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Have you looked at Arq? (Blatantly assuming you use Mac or Windows.) https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com
- tristor 10y ago
  I've looked into Borg/Attic as well. My main hang-up is where to put the repository and what my long-term storage costs would be. Right now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a terabyte of stuff backed up (mostly my Lightroom catalog). I need to be able to generate and access these backups from anywhere in the works reliably. I think Borg would be a great solution for my use at home where I have a NAS on my LAN to provide local storage for the repository. But while traveling the world with my MacBook it doesn't cut it. Arq looks good from that angle but I think would quickly cause my costs to overrun me. Having good backups is what gives me the confidence as a photographer to overcome my inner pack rat. Without good backups I'd never be able to ruthlessly delete images from my collection that don't exceed "okay" into "great". But because I know my images are backed up effectively forever I can really be honest in my art.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago

nyolfen 10y ago

as far as free alternatives, i saw no mention yet of borg[0]/borgmatic[1], which i quite like -- think 'rsync with encryption and pruning'. [0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [1] https://github.com/witten/borgmatic https://github.com/witten/borgmatic

rsync 10y ago
Ignore. Deleted. I thought the linked-to article was from a third party. Please enjoy HN frontpage without our butting in.
Veratyr 10y ago
The problem with Borg is that it requires an actual mounted FS or SSH (with a live mounted FS on the other end). You can't just point it at offline storage. Totally a great option if you do have live storage to backup to but personally I don't have a full server worth of disk spare at any given time.

rarrrrrr 10y ago

After looking through our records, I think perhaps you might mean 2015 instead of 2016. I took over the company that year and some things have changed. At the time customer satisfaction ratings were around 84%, and we're in the high 90s now. If I've found the correct case, we did at least suspend billing when the issue started and eventually issued a full refund. I'm sorry we weren't able to determine the cause of the slowness for you. Troubleshooting an end-to-end encrypted product is hard because you can't just see everything that's happening by looking at the server. We have seen ISPs deny or aggressively throttle connections to our destination networks. Palo Alto firewalls classify traffic to SpiderOak as an online backup service and often block it outright or put it at least priority. I'm not saying that these were necessarily the causes in your situation. SpiderOak keeps improving and the 2017 road map is action packed. If for some reason you would ever like to try SpiderOak again on me, you're welcome to contact me directly, or write to support@spideroak.com where these days we do a pretty good job of taking care of everyone. Otherwise I'm glad you've found backup solutions you're happy with. Cheers!

hluska 10y ago
Let me see if I have this straight. In response to a story from a customer, you went through all of your records and then shared information about the case in public. I'm glad your customer satisfaction scores are higher, but I'd rather not share any of my information with you. I'm not the op, but if I was, I would feel rather violated.
- tjallingt 10y ago
  All he said was that they refunded the guy, seems like information that is pretty OK to share publicly especially in response to the claim that their customer support was terrible. In addition to that the person who commented shared a large amount of information about the support ticket themselves so it seems like they are fine with sharing at least that much information about this case. All-in-all this hardly seems like a reason to feel "violated"...
- rarrrrrr 10y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. I'm sensitive to this issue too. For what it's worth, we do have very strict policy about what information regular customer service staff can access or share publicly (i.e. none in most cases) and how someone who calls in must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they really are the original customer before we will communicate with them. We're very careful about allowing any customer data to exist in 3rd party systems. We don't even use Google Analytics. https://medium.com/@mccamon/yeah-we-ditched-google-2fa644578964 https://medium.com/@mccamon/yeah-we-ditched-google-2fa644578... That said, many people also expect customer support delivered over Twitter so some flexibility is required. In this case I made a judgement call and decided to answer.

ar-jan 10y ago

For rolling your own, I would also highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic https://github.com/restic/restic

Freaky 10y ago
Note: no support for compression. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21

tedmiston 10y ago

> I still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful. Unreliable and slow completely describes my experience with both Backblaze (lost the data for one of my drives which unfortunately I learned after the drive failed) and Crashplan (the Java client brings my rMBP to a crawl when it runs). There has got to be a decent online backup service that's reliable, reasonably priced, and respectful of resources out there somewhere. Two that have been recommended to me recently that I haven't tried yet but would like to are Arq Backup [1] and Tarsnap [2]. [1]: https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ [2]: http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/

k-mcgrady 10y ago
As a counter point my experience with Backblaze has been perfect. Been using it since it first came out I think, backs data up relatively fast, and when my drive failed they shipped me a USB drive with all of my data in a day or two (and I believe it came from US > UK so that's pretty impressive). At $5 a month for unlimited I haven't even thought of switching. I believe - although I could be wrong - they also encrypt the dat and give you the option of managing the keys so they don't have access.
- red0point 10y ago
  Just clarifying on that encryption bit - they do indeed encrypt the data, but when restoring (e.g. logging into the web view & selecting files to restore) you're handing over your passphrase in plain text, as the decryption is done on their side.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Also if you need to do an "extreme" restore beyond what's available in the web app, Backblaze requires you to give them your password in plaintext via email and if you use a private key to additionally either share that in plain text via email or disable it. Of course, I changed to a temporary password but nonetheless this was an extremely concerning experience to me as a security-conscious person. Backblaze is great until you actually have to do a restore. They are a huge company and could use secure channels if they wanted to.

rsync 10y ago

Ignore. Deleted. I thought the linked-to article was from a third party. Please enjoy HN frontpage without our butting in.

zda 10y ago
Is info@ the best email address to reach you? I didn't get a reply when I tried a few months ago.
- rsync 10y ago
  Yes, info@. Check your spam folder - I can't imagine we'd miss an email there ... Either way, send an email today - we'll be watching.

peterwwillis 10y ago

I don't buy remote hosted storage, so when I saw $12/month for 1TB I was like "whoa, that's way too cheap to be reliable". Then I looked up other services, and some are as low as $4-$5/month for "unlimited" data, with some others being significantly more expensive. It seems to me these providers are basically a web hoster that specializes in storage, which means 24/7 support, very high uptime, capital investment in infrastructure and ongoing maintenance and planned upgrades, and technical specialization for writing and supporting custom software. Many web hosters get away with low prices by not guaranteeing data integrity and putting a premium on large amounts of storage (or simply over-selling capacity). It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month. For just photos, I would buy the second or third to cheapest option and be done with it, but it still gives me the willies that these prices are so low. The prices of different providers seems almost spastic, running from $1.50 to $150 for a terabyte of backup. Unless there's very good reasons for the variance in price, something seems fishy.

schoen 10y ago
> It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month. Some of them (I remember Tarsnap's page about this) outsource the storage itself to AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ $12 per TB per month would give a slight profit margin on the S3 Standard - Infrequent Access class (currently, a profit of about $2.20 per TB per month) and a significant profit margin on Glacier (about $10.90), with an appreciable loss (about $6.50) if the average customer block exceeded the Infrequent Access restrictions. It might be possible to make the client optimize accesses in some way that makes it less likely that many blocks will exceed Infrequent Access rules, and maybe even to try to keep the typical block in Glacier instead? https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#sia_anchor https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#sia_anchor It seems like an interesting challenge. (Yes, support and administrative costs need to come out of that profit margin.) Also, Amazon apparently offers "lifecycle policies" to try to do this automatically instead of explicitly. It seems like those policies try to migrate blocks into a cheaper tier that assumes less frequent access if the blocks have not, in fact, been accessed on a certain schedule. A cloud storage vendor using AWS as its backend could then try to optimize manually at the per-user level, or just let AWS do it itself empirically, which wouldn't save quite as much money as correct guesses about what particular users will do with particular data, but would require minimal engineering effort on the vendor's part. Edit: It seems like it will be hard to compete with the AWS/S3 backend for this kind of service! Now I wonder if there are providers who are known not to use S3.

jgmjgm 10y ago

I totally agree. Just a couple of months ago I had to dump them. Support was awful. This was my experience: When I purchased my SpiderOak account everything seemed to be going well. The service is twice as expensive as BackBlaze and CrashPlan but has better security. The software UI is also quite intuitive. The only problem was the support. A couple of weeks into my subscription my client died. I’d try to restart it and it would die again. I looked into the problem and then I emailed support at SpiderOak. Then I waited. Then I got an email from someone at SpiderOak saying that an ad campaign really paid off and they were signing up a lot of clients. They’d get back to me. They never did. I sent other emails. Sent my log files in. I was very, very polite. Over a week went by. Finally, I asked told them I’d really rather not work with them any more. More time went by. Finally, someone got back to me. They gave me instructions on how to cancel my account. They said they were sorry but they understood. Then they also told me how to fix my original problem. I would have stayed with SpiderOak if they had done something, anything more than that. I realize margins are tight but surely they could have thought a little bit about how to give me some confidence in their support. Instead, I was left with the distinct impression that their support staff is either chronically understaffed, under qualified or just doesn’t give a damn. Either way, it made me realize that this was not a company I could count on if something really went wrong.

elementalest 10y ago

My experience with spideroak has overall been very poor as I discussed in a previous thread on HN [1]. I have since moved away from spideroak and am using duplicati [2]. Honestly, things have been much better since then. I have not had any issues, and whats more, duplicati is free and open source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306745 [2] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/

hvidgaard 10y ago

Shameless plug. Not because I'm affiliated, but because I really like the product. Arc Backup. It's not cheap, and it doesn't include any storage, but you get a good client, and you can choose the storage you want. Most of the popular cloud providers are supported.

msh 10y ago

I have been using spideroak for a couple of years. I agree its slow compared to other providers, but its seems reliable to me, both what it uploads and testing restores. Right now I have a small backup selection (around 90 gigs) but most of the time I had been running with a approx 800 gigabyte backup set on my mac and except for slow initial upload (I am located in europe so that might also factor in) everything have been running fine.

chmars 10y ago

That reminds me of CrashPlan. They throttle uploads and deny it – and they have been promising a native Mac client for years. Scanning of new / changed data is rather slow too. I was testing SpiderOak two or three years ago. The client was awful but slightly less awful than CrashPlan's Java-based client. These days, I use a mix of Backblaze and Arq (with Amazon Cloud Drive). Backblaze is great but versioning is limited to 30 days. More versioning is probably not feasible, i.e., other cloud backup providers with unlimited versioning have to find other ways to keep their data usage under control.

wsha 10y ago

Syncanny development appears to be on indefinite hiatus, so it's not something I would want to trust my backups with.