SpiderOak

The current version for Mac is 7.5.0, released February 2019. This is not a confidence builder for the prospective user. I have used SO One for over a decade, and been happy and confident, however, it is now 3 1/2 years since an update. As of today, I still give it 5 stars for performance and function, but my confidence in its future is 1 star.

SpiderOak cans its Warrant Canary, suffers mysterious massive outage, and raised prices: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/94nspi/spideroak_cans_its_warrant_canary_suffers/

The current version is 6.3.0

the real outstanding feature of spideroak is that you can backup and sync any folder on your system. i didnt find any cloud service where this was possible. (if anybody knows another app for this plz respond)

Now they have dropped support for 10.7, saying "only 0.04% of Mac users are currently 3 major OS versions behind"... :-/ Well, maybe the vast majority of Mac users use the last OS, but does that vast majority need to sync different machines? I wonder if Spideroak team considered this question: who needs syncing? I'm quite sure that many Mac users have at least one (more or less)-recent machine and an old one to sync, so, am I going to dive in a syncing service that only one of my 4 computers can currently use? and knowing that in a year or two they will probably abandon Mavericks too? I consider it a "sinking service", instead... :-D I'm really bored with those companies who use such an excuse as "old OS" when they still support Windows XP! (2001-2008) Compare it to Snow Leopard (2009-2011) that was a lot more modern OS! I'm one of the "would like to use Spideroak" people who had to find some other solution...:-(

Spideroak is the Cloud Service I want to use, because privacy is their number one priority. They really do care about keeping everything as save as possible and came up with the idea of Zero Knowledge as the gold standard. It means that Spideroak as a company does not have any access to your master password. That way if the NSA comes sniffing around, there's simply nothing to give them. In the role of a super paranoid user thats the best you can get, except for one more thing: Spideroak is a US company with servers also located in the US. In paranoid theory that means that the US goverment can make Spideroak implement a backdoor into the software. Something that they kinda worked around with their canary feature. But still, one thing i dislike about Spideroak is the fact that they did everything to keep your data as save as possible, except for the fact that its a US based company, which puts them under quite a lot bullshit privacy laws the USA have. You might argue that this is extremely paranoid and i completely agree with you, but i personally beleive that spideroak only makes sense to use if you are extremely paranoid.

Another thing i like about Spideroak is the fact that they offer Cloud BackUp (like Crashplan or Backblaze) and Cloud Syncing (like Dropbox and Google Drive) at the same time. So you dont need two services anymore, but just one super secure service, which is great!

But because of its extreme security comes the downside that it limits you in many ways. With the Spideroak mobile app you can pretty much only look at files. There is no mobile upload for adding files or uploading all your pictures, theres no simple(!) sharing like you know from Dropbox and others. Sure its great to store all your files in a super secure vault, but for documents you access and modify daily, its a pain in the a** having to open the vault everytime.

The speed of Spideroak isn't very good. I havent done any real speedtest i could display, but it just doesnt feel fast. There are many reviews of Spideroak saying the same thing. Its just not a fast service. And that can be really annoying if you have to download a huge backup.

The App SpideroakONE finally looks better than the old verion from the 90s. Sadly it seems to be the same application underneath which needs a lot processing power and makes my computer feel slow from time to time. However its a very powerful app with lots of settings.

SUMMARY: Spideroak does its best on keeping your files private and save, but being a US service is a huge bummer, because like it or not the USA is spying more today than probably all other countries combined. So if you want to go the extra mile behind the first extra mile, id choose a european service to begin with, where the government is much more limited on what theyre allowed to access. Plus the super privacy on Spideroak limits you in so many ways. When using Spideroak youll see yourself using the cloud much less, because there arent all the features youre looking for compared to Dropbox or Drive. Its just super annoying.

Recommendation: Decide on how much time, efforts and lack of features youre willing to accept for a certain level of security and privacy. I have all my files on OneDrive which isnt nearly as encrypted as Spideroak. Thats why I keep a seperate folder for important Stuff encrypted inside my OneDrive. The security now is comparable to Spideroak. The Master Password is only on my local computer and the encrypted files are stored inside the US. That way i get all the goodies from a cloud service for regular files. important files are encrypted and to be accessed with a little workaround. For backup i connect Arq to my OneDrive which also encrypts all my backups and stores them safely. OneDrive is not only one of the cheapest today for $50 a year, it also give you unlimited cloud storage and also includes Microsoft Office 365, which many of us need anyway. Plus the performance of OneDrive is surprisingly good.

To me theres just no reason on using Spideroak and i imagine there to be only a very tiny group of people actually benefitting from it.

After downloading and installing, it slowed down my Mac so I had to uninstall it. I don't know why they don't test these app out before the release them.

To enlighten my former review, here is the mail I had by the end of March from SpiderOak support: "Unfortunately, you won't be able to run the newest version of SpiderOak if you are still using OS X 10.6 or older versions. Beginning with version 5.1.10, SpiderOak requires OS X 10.7 Lion or higher. If you are still running on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you will need to upgrade in order to use SpiderOak. As a temporary workaround, you may use an older version of SpiderOak which works on OS X 10.6. You can get it at no cost here: https://spideroak.com/getbuild?platform=mac&version=5.1.8 Please note, however, that our new version 5.1.10 introduces an important security improvement. In order for SpiderOak to always be proactive in using the latest security and privacy standards, we are moving to SHA-256 based SSL certificates, and versions prior to 5.1.10 are not compatible with them. When the move is complete, older versions of SpiderOak will no longer connect to our servers. This will happen soon, so act now to avoid any service interruption."

v5.2.20 is out. Any former version will soon be (or is?) unable to connect to their server, due to format changes or else. So, if like me you were syncing an old 32 bit mac, forget it. I'm using Spideroak from time to time since last summer and I still feel the same: not as easy as Dropbox and the interface is incomprehensible at first glance... In the end, I use Dropbox for anything I need to share quickly with no need for privacy, and when I want to share something more private I use Spideroak — just to be on the safe side... ;-) v5.2.20 only brought internal changes, I'm sure an interface upgrade and a behaviour closer to Dropbox's would make this app a must have

I'm Loving It!!!

Since signing up for Spideroak I'm getting every day unwanted promotional emails from this company - and none of them has an "unsubscribe" link. It is also not possible to opt out of emails after logging into my account. Especially a company like Spideroak should do better. This makes this a zero star software/service for me (unfortunately I have to give them at least half a star).

After an afternoon of trials, yes it's a good alternative to Dropbox, especially if you use the dedicated "SpiderOak Hive" folder which behaves just like the Dropbox folder. I'm not convinced about the "Overview" panel, as it always says "Currently uploading", even when it's actually "downloading" (i.e. after I installed it on the second computer, it was logically downloading what's been put in the Hive folder of computer #1...) . It doesn't sync labels (though Dropbox does) — tried it between 10.9 to 10.6. So, if you don't care about labels and you don't need compatibility with PPC machines, it's ok.

Recommended by Edward Snowden (FWIW): http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-dropbox-privacy-spideroak

I've just started using it this afternoon and it seems to be a good replacement to Dropbox, as it's well integrated in the Finder, but unfortunately, it's not working on my iMac G5 (as stated there: https://spideroak.com/opendownload/ Current version needs OS 10.6).

Security and privacy. Best out there.

Great solution. I have been using it on and off, started few years ago but it consumed 6-8% of resources on Mac but I gave it a try recently again and I must say it's way better, consumes 1-2 person when uploading and 0.0-0.5 when idle, which is amazing given that this is one of few relatively more secure sync or share solution out there. This does encryption of data on your machine, rather than sending unencrypted or through SSL and then encrypted. In case of DropBox all they say it's encrypted on their servers, but where is no guarantee how the data and keys are stored, so you got to have something like boxcryptor or cloudflogger. Keep in mind that the much celebrated SugarSync (now virtually unaffordable and outpriced for most of average people) is same way insecure as dropbox, no local AES encryption, just in transit and final encryption on their server. I don't know about Googledrive and Skydrive, but the only other service similar to SpiderOak is Syncplicity. Syncplicity is much easier to use and has nice new interface on iPad (but sorry, secure editing of documents on iPad doesn't work in case you are excited about that part), however, only SpiderOak allows you to fine-tune the sync through their interface. So while the SpiderOak interface requires user manual (I had to check a few things), it's perfectly configurable, almost overwhelming, but very useful for power-user, and - hey - you don't use the interface every day - you set it and forget it. The linking with devices and machines is the most tricky part of SpiderOak. The other part I am a little bit puzzled is where they state on the website following: ---- Important Note: When accessing your data via the SpiderOak website or a mobile device, you must enter your password which will then exist in the SpiderOak server memory for the duration of your browsing session. For this amount of time your password is stored in encrypted memory and never written to an unencrypted disk. The moment your browsing session ends your password is destroyed and no further trace is left. ---- So I am little bit puzzled reading this, but of course after re-reading this again, this is nothing unusually compared to any other online service when you login. They just put this disclaimer as they claim on other place on their website how they have "zero knowledge" and absolute privacy. In any case - if you are really concerned about privacy, I wouldn't store bare data in the cloud. In that case using something like Coudfrogger or Boxcryptor is better and if you want total security, you have to go with something like Truecrypt (but issue is obviously you have to update whole encrypted volume every time its content changes, which could be unrealistic in cases with volumes over 1GB and slow network connection under 1mb upload speed. I think it's really overdue the cloud storage providers come with better ways to store the data and provide option if I want to store the encryption key with my data online or not (and therefore forgo accessing it online or not). Overall I think SpiderOak is a good solution for sync if you are looking to sync folders and do backup rather than having 1 folder only as it's in case of say Dropbox. The cost is reasonable, compared to Sugarsync new rates.

I don't understand why this is just now showing up. This version, 5.03, was released on 15 August, and is showing up here at the end of October.

Took at look at this a while back and went another route. After many issues with a few of the services (Amazon S3 and Mac OS X still have their differences, to put it kindly!) gave SpiderOak another try. They seem to have come a long, long way. The application is solid, easy to navigate and a breeze to set up. Got in touch with support on reinstating my email address so I could try the service again, and their response came the same day. Now have it installed on both my iMac and my laptop PC, and it's hard to tell from the UI as to which platform I'm on. That's the way it should be! All in all, if you haven't tried this service as of yet, you should give it a spin. I'm glad I did.

Just started using, but I found one strange thing about it: the only way to quit it (besides via the command line) is to kill the two running process for it in Activity Monitor. I realize it is meant has a sync'ing backup system, so I guess it is meant to be on all the time, but how about if one doesn't want it to be for some reason or another? Clearly they're trying to get you to rent storage space -- which is fine -- but the GUI ought to have a way to quit the application/service as well. Looking at the manual, it says one needs to close spideroak to access it via the command line, but nowhere does it say how to close spideroak. The only answer on the spideroak forum (which is where clicking the help button got me) provided no better answer than killing the SO processes from Activity Monitor. The application does not show up as a running application, so one can't kill it from the Force quit menu, and it doesn't show up as an active application on the dock and hasn't menubar options either. To me it is very strange to be lacking such a basic feature.

Still the slowest sync I have seen among so-called cloud services, but the recent improvements in public rooms may help. This is a feature many will not need in using a cloud service for backup. But when it comes to costly online storage for public file distribution, it might serve. The new hive and device syncing might appeal to some as well, just don't expect anything better in cost and storage limits than you will find elsewhere. SpideOak does have on advantage over most; it allows you to store you local files/folders where you want them and then target them for syncing in their proprer location... even on a network or portable drive. That part is very nice and a step above some of the lead competitors, such as DropBox. I will keep watching S.O. for more improvemnents... such as limiting public access through an external domain so that files cannot be downloaded except though my own site(s). That would pull ahead of the rest of the cloud services as well