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SpiderOak - very nice people =)

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tomos:
I got an account with SpiderOak sometime in 2008 (I think that was shortly after they started up) - it was a special offer - I got a 10GB account.

I believe I never actually used it. After seeing positive reports about it here (especially that all data is encrypted) I rooted around and fired it up but was unable to access the account. I contacted them and was very honest about not using it etc. The software was an early version & wasnt working/connecting any more, but my password didnt work online either (which may well have been my fault). Anyways in the end we cancelled the account and I created a new one and they gave me 10GB on it (default free account is 2GB)

Which I think was very good of them, service was prompt and very friendly too :Thmbsup:

CleverCat:
I agree - I ended up with way more storage because of a glitch in a sign up recommended by a friend! Always answer queries too... :Thmbsup:

iphigenie:
I am very pleased with spideroak, been a paying customer for a while, got several people to use it (although none paying i dont think). They seem like a bunch of real people working together, which is how i prefer my online companies to be. People with names, less posturing, pedigree and less legalese than many :Thmbsup: (many of the online backup companies have slick site, 2-3 "pedigreed serial silicon valley entrepreneurs" listed on the about page, no real people and no real contact details...)

Early on the main attraction was that it worked on linux, so no matter what machine i had and what os I booted, i could backup and recover things. Things like versioning and encryption came as icing on the cake. I do think the sync is a bit unwieldy (especially in disk space used) but it is safe. I think I have used nearly all features at one point or another.

Deozaan:
The thing I don't like about SpiderOak (the software) is that if you try to restore from a backup (after a format, for example), it will copy everything back to the original directory locations and doesn't give you an option to download the content to a different location. This isn't good if you moved file locations since your last install (e.g. Games are now on E:\Games\ instead of D:\Games).

Then you have to manually delete the old backup locations and manually add the new backup locations instead of just being able to choose an option like "restore these files to this new location and use the new location for future backups."

f0dder:
SpiderOak seems like a nice company, and I somehow find their stance on "unlimited storage" reassuring - they don't offer it. And they don't just "encrypt everything", they use zero-knowledge encryption, and even avoid cross-customer block de-duplication (which could save them significant storage costs) simply because it would be a potential security problem.

I've got their blog added in Website Watcher, there's occasionally some really interesting stuff there.

Unfortunately the client software isn't perfect - it's a bit on the slow side, even if it's been improved a fair amount. I know the guys want to keep their code as portable as possible, but it'd be really really nice if they added NTFS USN Journal support (can speed up scanning for changes after system boot by craploads) and would split into a service+GUI so the backup can run without being logged on...

Oh, and offer smaller plans. The free offering is a bit little for me, but OTOH I really don't need 100GB of storage. I can understand why they don't want to go into, say, per-gigabyte prices... But perhaps 10 or 25GB increments?

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