Online backup: SpiderOak

After downloading this morning’s find, my first thought was I must never lose this!—so I spent some time thinking about backup strategies.

Most of my data are backed up by shoving them into a subversion repository containing most of my home directory. This is a techy, nerdy way of doing things that works very well for some data, and gives me the ability to perform very sophisticated change tracking.

It works rather poorly for some data, though. In particular, it’s not ideal for storing large sets of binary data…like an 8.1 GiB repository of scanned books [embedded] in PDF format (or like music, or video files). It also has another weakness, not intrinsic to the mechanism but significant in my usage: Because my subversion repository is housed on the same server and server account as my websites, I’m not 100% comfortable uploading very sensitive data. It’s a shared server (although I have of course disabled read permissions for other users), and it runs, with my user priveleges, my own webapps—which are of course no more secure than I made them.

So I decided it was finally time to look into alternative backup strategies. I’m quite happy with subversion for e.g. text files that I modify, my projects’ source code, and so forth, but for photos, videos, music, and large downloaded collections of RPG supplements that I’ll never edit anyway, I want something else. Having heard the name bandied about, I of course looked into DropBox, which looks quite OK. I did spend some extra time looking around, though, and came across a DropBox competitor I had not heard of: SpiderOak.

Both DropBox and SpiderOak offers a free 2 GiB storage account with paid upgrades to 50 GiB or more. Both offer secure, encrypted transport, synchronisation between multiple computers, etc. However, SpiderOak offers a few features that DropBox does not, some of which are quite interesting.

• Sharing data in place rather than having to stick them in a dedicated directory; I can backup my documents directory, for instance, instead of having to create and use .DropBox/documents.
• “Zero knowledge” security means that data are stored encrypted, and SpiderOak does not store my password. This is fantastic and wonderful (though it does come with the caveat that if my password is lost, it cannot be retrieved). No matter what I upload, encrypted transport means that no one can eavesdrop on it, and encryption means that no one, not even SpiderOak employees, can get at it. I can be as comfortable storing even very sensitive data, like passwords and personal information, in SpiderOak as I can on my local computer (however comfortable you think I should be with that).
• Extra storage at half the price is a pretty obvious advantage. $10/month gets me 50 GiB at DropBox or 100 GiB at SpiderOak.

Client software is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X, so you can share data across platforms. (This is also true of DropBox, of course.) Unlike DropBox, much (though not all) of the client software is open source, and SpiderOak claims that they are moving towards a full OSS client. (They’ve already shared some code.)

On paper, then, SpiderOak is about as close to perfect as it can get for my needs. What remains to be seen is just how smooth and seamless the experience turns out to be when I start using it (it has a reputation in some parts for being a bit of a resource hog; to me, that sounds like a small price). If it’s as good as I’m hoping, I will recommend it to everyone I know.

If this convinces you to sign up, please use this referral link to give me some bonus space in return for my time writing this up. (Pretty please?)