2022-01-02

Goodbye SpiderOak

I have been using SpiderOak One since Edward Snowden recommended it in 2013, almost a decade ago. I have over 1.5T of deduplicated data spread across 6 or so devices. This year, in 2022, I will not be renewing my subscriptions.

The main issues:

  1. Lack of updates: the last update to SpiderOak One was in 2019-09. All recent updates have been for CrossClave. It is evident that One is no longer a priority.
  2. Lack of speed: since day one (ha!) One has always been slower than competitors like Dropbox. In the beginning it wasn't so bad and one must makes some tradeoffs for the security offered. However in recent years this has not improved and setting up a new device takes days if it ever completes the initial synchronisation. Once setup the application is bloated, slow, generates massive amounts of local metadata.
  3. Lack of control: One installations will randomly stall on sync or update because _another_ device has  gone bad. This is not a great situations when I have devices spread across the city.

To replace SpiderOak One I am currently using:

  1. Kopia for backup with de-duplication and client-side encryption.  The target is backblaze b2.
  2. Sync.com for file sync. Note that Sync.com doesn't provide the same security guarantees as Kopia or SpiderOak, but I am willing to trade that for a sync solution that is fast, quick and affordable.
    1. There is no native linux client but the Sync.com client runs decently under wine and the performance on my slowest machines are acceptable.