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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been with SpiderOak for a while and am considering dropping it (the client is buggy and the company seems to have moved on to other services, letting this die). I’ve seen rsync.net posted here before, and I’ve also seen rsync (rsync.net’s founder’s HN account) comment here often.

One thing I would like to see on rsync.net is a single page that shows the different prices for a specific chosen storage capacity, including the (special) borg account pricing. Perhaps a separate page for the “HN Readers discount” (at rsync.net/hn, maybe?) too? Trawling through older order links with specific codes posted on HN seems a bit tedious (and likely not reliable since those could be outdated).

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SpiderOak's CLI has been pretty stable for me across Windows, Linux, and now Mac (M1). The GUI is definitely buggy and tends to freeze for long periods of time, though.

Does anyone have an inside knowledge of the company wrt their plan for SpiderOak One? I'm grandfathered into the old unlimited plan and I'd rather not have to migrate any time soon.

I'm also interested in this. I've been using SpiderOak for years, but am currently trying to migrate away (to rsync.net, coincidentally). It's not that I've ever had any issues with SpiderOak, but nor do they seem to be a very engaged company (e.g. I've never heard of a SpiderOak person posting here on HN, but @rsync is never far away and is always friendly). It does sound like their efforts are in other directions.

GP here. I'm not on an unlimited plan, but am on a grandfathered plan that's cheaper per GB compared to what's on the website now.

I've had multiple issues with SpiderOak on backing up with the GUI (sluggish or getting stuck) and creating multiple versions of the same files. While I don't have inside knowledge, the company has said in emails that it's not actively working on ONE backup (this has been the case for the last two or more years). Any changes/improvements on ONE backup are postponed and left to a "we may probably get to it at some point" state. From the website and the marketing emails, it looks like the company is focused on "Space Security" and the CrossClave messaging product for enterprises.

Same boat here, SpiderOak on Ubuntu (not much issues fortunately) but it does seem abandoned and not sure about its future.

As a general noob I also don't understand how I should use rsync.net appropriately. Do I encrypt all my data files before or is that done by Borg/Restic for example?

GP here. You’d have to encrypt the data before sending it to rsync.net. Borg and Restic can do that for you, but you’d have to manage the encryption keys safely). Doing it by yourself before borg or Restic do the backup is unnecessarily complex.

There’s a special “borg account” at a lower price (compared to the standard one) on rsync.net. That one assumes that you setup the retention policies for older versions in borg since rsync.net doesn’t do any (additional) snapshots/retentions (like it does for the standard, but slightly costlier, accounts).

The bigger issue is making sure others (in one’s circles) who may need the data are able to use the tool for backups and restores. That’s where I prefer GUI tools that are easy to use and easy to demonstrate, rather than CLI tools and scripts.

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