My cousin (and his crew) just launched a new online storage and backup service called SpiderOak.
One of the especially friendly features includes the automated invisible backup feature:
SpiderOak automatically recognizes any new and/or edited document, photo, song, or movie and backs it up in real time without you ever having to think, wonder or worry. This automated system works quietly in the background – never slowing down applications or Internet connections.
They also have versioning so you can roll back to any previous version of a backed-up file. They have desktop client software for Mac, Windows, Linux 32 bit, and Linux 64 bit. They’ve also open sourced some of their code.
There’s a growing number of online file storage and backup services out there, but if you’re in the market you may want to add SpiderOak to your consideration list. They have pay plans and a free plan that includes 2GB of space.
RELATED: A New Online Backup Solution (O’Reilly Digital Media)
Paul Farnell
on 07 Feb 08This looks really neat, thanks. You didn’t mention the best part, 2gb storage free!
P.S. Someone likes DIN ;)
Kyle Pike
on 07 Feb 08I commend your cousin for jumping into such a crowded market. Downloading the client now…can’t beat free 2gb.
Joshua Peek
on 07 Feb 08I really like Mozy (http://mozy.com/) so far. Its cheap too, like $5 a month. I’ve been messing with a ton of different online backups this week, will give this one a try.
Fubiz
on 07 Feb 08Yes. 2go free, it’s very pleasant!
andrew_h
on 07 Feb 08will there be a connection* to basecamp? A
*software-wise, not family relation
carlivar
on 07 Feb 08Is it just me or does almost every company these days seem to just throw together two random words for a company name?
Russell
on 07 Feb 08Well, all the one word brand names/URLs are taken. What else are people supposed to do? ;)
August Lilleaas
on 07 Feb 08The fact that spideroak.com was a 100% flash site gave me second thoughts. Come on, it’s 2008!
Edddy
on 07 Feb 08I try to download it, but was greeted with a “USA/Canada only” USA/Canada?? come on, it’s the internet!!!
Justin Reese
on 07 Feb 08What does it mean, “never slowing down [...] Internet connections”? How does it manage to upload without using any bandwidth?
(Yes, I’m being cheeky.)
I really can’t wait for Stateside upload speeds to be fast enough to make this practical. I commend your cousin’s forward-thinking-ness.
Mike
on 07 Feb 08I like that it maintains folder structure, I’m definitely going to give this a try!
My ISP, who shall remain nameless because I don’t want to offend Time Warner, offers online file backup. The catch is that it doesn’t allow for folders, so 4000 pictures end up in the exact same place. Worthless.
Eric Anderson
on 07 Feb 08Giving it a try but the client software so far is flaky at best. First it runs really slow. Even when my computer isn’t doing much else. Click on a tab and wait a few seconds while the screen updates. Scrolling is painful.
I know I have an older computer (4 years old, 1GHz, 1GB ram) but it’s backup software not CAD software. It shouldn’t require much processing power! Left it overnight to let it do it’s initial backup of my stuff (about 500 MB worth of stuff). Came in this morning and found it 100% CPU locked up. Had to kill it and start it up again. Must have gotten confused sometime during the backup because only 200 MB got backed up so more waiting for the rest to be uploaded.
The concept it nice. But from the client point of view the execution is poor so far. I’m going to give it more time. Obviously it is new software and has kinks to work out.
Rob
on 07 Feb 08I recently started using JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/). It’s a $20 (one-time fee for unlimited installs) client that works on any computer that automatically maps a drive to your Amazon S3 account.
The client also has the automatic backup capabilities built-in for your crucial folders. I wouldn’t recommend backing up your whole laptop….just the critical files/documents. Who needs to recover a full OS anyways?
Jeff L
on 07 Feb 08tell them to set a background color on their website…looks pretty bad without one.
Martin
on 07 Feb 08I have to agree with Eric so far. Really unresponsive UI, giving the CPU a fit (I reduced the backup amount to 86MB, helps a bit), does not maintain upload speed (mostly only 0-10kB/s, long amounts with no transfer at all).
I am not impressed so far. I kicked Mozy, because it would hang with 100% CPU for ages. JungleDisk worked very well when I tried.
Dan Reese
on 07 Feb 08@Martin: Were you using the Windows version or the Mac version? I’m one of the developers at Mozy and want to pass on your comments to the right people in order to things fixed.
The SpiderOak Team
on 07 Feb 08Eddy:
Due to the nature of SpiderOak’s strong encryption, we’re required to notify and gain the approval of the NSA before “exporting” SpiderOak. This is a legal process that involves paperwork and waiting. Currently, we’re able to allow downloads to the US, Canada, United Kingdom, most of the European Union, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
Eric, Martin:
There are definitely some known situations where SpiderOak can be slow to respond, and corrections for this are the focus of the next major release.
Typically the high CPU use times are short (when queued files are being built.) Once a few upload transactions are finished building, SpiderOak waits for some uploads to complete before building more. So, on a typical network connection, there will be short spikes of CPU activity as more files are built, with the spikes separated by long upload periods of negligible CPU use while uploads progress.
With SpideOak’s transactional nature and comprehensive encryption, each file is built (converted into a cryptographic data structure) before upload. There are numerous optimizations planned for making this less CPU intensive, but many of these involve platform specific code across 3 operating systems. For the 1.0.0 release, we focused on making the core accurate.
SpiderOak’s data deduplication process, which provides for space efficient storage and versioning, means that the transactions, reference counting, and distributed transaction replay across all computers, are important to get 100.00% right.
Thank you for your interest and feedback, and most of these issues will go away in the next major version.
The SpiderOak Team
This discussion is closed.