The SpiderOak developers are working on moving all of the file index into an on-disk instead of in-memory database, at which point this should no longer be an issue. It’s not unusual for SpiderOak to consume 500MB-1Gb of RAM on my machine. In this case, its ambient RAM usage can balloon. In particular, it has an issue when its index contains backups with an exceptionally large number of directories – as happens when backing up the full contents of linux systems.It’s not unusual for CPU and disk usage to suddenly spike for a few seconds after changing some files, as SpiderOak detects the change and backs it up. This can put a considerable burden on your systems in terms of CPU and memory usage. All the chunking, deduplication, encryption, and sync calculations have to be done on the client side. Because it is zero-knowledge, SpiderOak can’t delegate any of its processing to the cloud.At $1/GB/year, it is cheaper than many of the alternatives.SpiderOak keeps version histories of files, not just a single backup.And then you can have SpiderOak sync the two collections! The de-duplication works well, and means that (for instance) if you have your entire music collection on two separate machines, the backup won’t take any extra space for the second machine.This was a big selling point for me, since I tend to have heterogeneous systems, or at least I did for a while. It works on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.There is no cap on number of systems backed up. They support and even encourage you to use it for as many machines as you want.For me, this is an essential requirement for a full-fledged backup service (as compared to a sync-and-share tool). That means that data is chunked and encrypted on the client side, and all the SpiderOak servers know is opaque data. Unlike many cloud-based storage systems, SpiderOak uses zero-knowledge encryption.I’ve also made occasional use of the filesharing features. With SpiderOak it pretty much just works. I used to use a VCS for this, but that was tedious and breakage prone. I’ve also switched over to using SpiderOak for synchronizing the large set of files that I keep consistent across all my machines. Since I started using SpiderOak a year or so ago, there have been several instances where I was able to retrieve an accidentally deleted file, or grab a set files that I had only saved on another machine. After SpiderOak’s de-duplication and compression, this comes to about 115GB of usage, so I fit easily in the 200GB plan. Unlike services such as Dropbox and ZumoDrive, the emphasis is on the backup part rather than the sync-and-share part.Īt present, I have about 384GB from four different machines backed up on SpiderOak’s servers. SpiderOak is a cloud-based backup, file synchronization, and sharing service. I realized if I was going to type up my thoughts I might as well post them where others could benefit from them as well. Dan Mayer asked about my experience with SpiderOak backup.
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