Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

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I think https://www.spideroak.com fits your list (specifically "One" which is their consumer solution/app). I'm a happy user who's had an account with them for years (it costs me under $10/month iirc).

It has/supports:

* Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android

* Lets you share your quota across unlimited machines/devices

* Lets you whitelist/blacklist folders & files to be backed up (by pointing and clicking and/or by specifying patterns)

* Does LAN syncing

* Keeps versioned file history forever (i.e. point-in-time recovery)

* Has scheduling but I haven't used this, it just runs quietly in the background and I never notice it negatively impacting anything (client and accompanying background service is currently using a total of 51MB of memory). You can cap the upload speed if you want to make sure it never saturates your uplink.

* Uses end to end encryption i.e. they don't have your key (important caveat: this is provided you only use their app and don't use their web interface, although even then they claim the key is never stored anywhere - just kept temporarily in the server's RAM while it auths/decrypts files for you)

* Been around for ages and not likely to go out of business any time soon

* Lets you share files with a self-destructing link

* Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?) so you can squeeze the most out of your quota (just checked my account and I'm using 94GB without compression & de-duplication but only being charged for 41GB)

Edit: and they release a lot of opensource: https://github.com/SpiderOak

I've tried Spideroak and I really tried to like / use it, but it never worked very well, feels unfocused and a bit unfinished.

I'm probably going to just move my photos to Dropbox (I know, its not a backup program, but it works and is very simple to deal with)

Not sure how recently you tried it but the current SpiderOak One app is solid and polished (imho anyway). It just works and is brain dead simple to use. Much more so than I remember Crash Plan ever being (admittedly haven't used them in years).

Edit: I've only ever used SpiderOak's Windows app though. No idea how good/bad their Linux client is.

Edit 2: this is what the current version looks like on my windows machine: http://imgur.com/a/KfnlQ

I've used them for a few years, not been particularly impressed with their speed. I'm also currently fighting a problem with the client quietly wedging on upload (not sure how long ago it stopped, but the upload queue was past 6GB), and the re-syndication process just sitting there seemingly doing nothing.

> Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?)

Err, I hope not. Pretty sure they sync a database of seen blocks between clients and they collectively dedupe based on that - their backend simply shouldn't have the information necessary to dedupe itself.

>Err, I hope not. Pretty sure they sync a database of seen blocks between clients and they collectively dedupe based on that - their backend simply shouldn't have the information necessary to dedupe itself.

Think you're right based on reading: https://spideroak.com/faq/what-is-deduplication

I assumed they'd use both techniques (i.e. de-dup client side when possible to save on upload) but that the way in which encrypted blocks were produced before uploading was deterministic (a bit like a hash function) so that if the same file was marked for backup on a different device the resulting blocks would be the same and could be de-duped server side.

Providing a unique salt was used client side (shared across all devices and not known by Spideroak) while making the block, it should be possible to end up with deterministic encrypted blocks that are still unique outside of your account (I think anyway... barely know what I'm talking about when it comes to the intricacies of crypto!)

Thanks corford.

I think I looked at spideroak a few years ago. Good to see they are still around. Might be my best fit.

A friend also suggested grabbing this table, export to your own spreadsheet and sort by what matters for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_se...

Ha, I think your friend is right :) The size of that list just goes to show there isn't a "one size fits all" backup solution out there. SpiderOak is my sweet spot but YMMV.

Think they offer a free trial (or they used to at least) so no harm in giving it a whirl. Good luck on your quest!

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