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SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

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Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#81

Post by elementalest »

_slwy wrote: post #77

Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading. However I noticed something odd. Accor…

I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well.

SO has no UI means to control version history. In order to limit version history (for example, to hourly versions per day, then 1 per day for a month, then 1 per week indefinitely), I need to run a script to close SO and run SO with some command line arguments. Having this functionality available in the UI would be nice.

The SO UI is slow to use. Over 6 years I have accumulated a lot of files and whenever I goto the manage tab to browse my files, it can take several seconds each time I expand tree nodes. The UI also becomes unresponsive, making browsing files take a while.

Manually deleting files/folders/version history is an absolute pain. Often, when deleting a folder in SO, only some of the contents are deleted, taking multiple attempts to delete. In some cases the contents of the folder disappear, but it shows root locations of drives as contents of the folder. When deleting anything, the UI becomes unresponsive for upwards of 30s, often significantly more for large folders or many version histories. Even selecting multiple files can take several seconds where the UI is unresponsive, the more files you select, the longer it becomes unresponsive. This makes file management take forever.

If I move a file temporarily, SO assumes it has been deleted and moves it to the 'Deleted items' folder. However, when I move the file back, SO create a new version of that file, leaving all version history in the deleted folder. It does not recognise the files are the same. This means that if a file is created and deleted numerous times (compiling pdf, or binary), hundreds of files with the same name are added to the 'Deleted items' folder. SO should be able to recognise the files are linked (perhaps checking the similarity of the files, only rejecting a link if they are more than 75% different) and create version histories instead of new files.

There is also no way to delete items in the 'Deleted items' folder after a period of time (2 years for example). The only way to delete items is to manually do it or clear everything, which I don't want to do as there are version histories that should be linked to currently existing files in the 'Deleted items' folder. I have had to resort to once a year putting a movie on and just manually going through folders for a few hours.

I really like the idea of SpiderOak, but it really is a poor implementation and just an all round pain to use. In the past I havn't minded waiting for new features and fixes, but its been 1.5 years since the new UI and nothing much has changed.

EDIT: And just to prove my point, I just tried to deleted a folder in the 'Deleted items' folder. The first attempt deleted everything within the folder, but a 'c:/' item appeared inside it. So I deleted the folder again. Half the contents of the folder a level above it just disappeared. This has happened before.

I think I give up.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#82

Post by Veratyr »

elementalest wrote: post #81
_slwy wrote: post #77

Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading. However I noticed something odd. Accor…

I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well. SO has no UI means to control version history. In…

The thing is that there's nothing actually special about SpiderOak as a service. Since the data is encrypted end to end, the only special thing is the client and as you've pointed out, there's is terrible.

On that note, once I gave up on SpiderOak I went looking for alternatives and they actually exist:

- Syncany: https://www.syncany.org/ - Java based, works on Windows and *NIX, uses S3, Dropbox, Flickr, FTP, Openstack Swift, SFTP and WebDAV as backends.

- Rclone: http://rclone.org - Go based, works on everything Go supports, uses Google Drive, S3, Swift, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon Drive, OneDrive, hubiC, Backblaze B2 and Yandex.Disk.

Syncany at least supports limited file versioning but not as granular as you seem to be after. The upside is that unlike SpiderOak, Syncany is open source and you can contribute features you want. If you're only after backup, there's also Borg which might work for you: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#83

Post by elementalest »

Veratyr wrote: post #82
elementalest wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using SpiderOak (SO) for nearly 6 years. However, I have been keeping an eye out for a viable alternative as I feel SO is starting to be neglected. In the past year or so, SO has barely received any updates (apart from the occasional minor bug fix). Semaphore seems to be taking up all their dev time. This would not be such an issue if everything ran well. SO has no UI means to control version history. In…

The thing is that there's nothing actually special about SpiderOak as a service. Since the data is encrypted end to end, the only special thing is the client and as you've pointed out, there's is terrible. On that note, once I gave up on SpiderOak I went looking for alternatives and they actually exist: - Syncany: https://www.syncany.org/ - Java based, works on Windows and *NIX, uses S3, Dropbox, Flickr, FTP, Opensta…

I looked at Syncany, but it looks like the project is dead:

> The core team of Syncany is on hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. Feel free to do with the code what the license allows and encourages, but please don't expect any maintenance. The team thanks everyone who has contributed to Syncany in one way or another.

rclone doesn't really have the features i'm looking for.

I have however found Duplicati: http://www.duplicati.com, which looks like it might serve my needs.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#84

Post by Ar-Curunir »

iaml wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're speaking the language of product marketing, which is one I sort of speak too, can I gingerly offer you some advice? Until you come up with some other cool-sounding term for end-to-end encrypted storage, every time your product is discussed in a forum that includes people familiar with cryptography, the discussion is going to be dominated with threads about how your product doesn't do what its name claims…

Unless your target audience is not people who read such forums.

Except when people look for third party reviews of said products, and find threads upon threads of cryptographers calling out SpiderOak for misleading advertisement. Surely that's just bad PR?

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#85

Post by Ar-Curunir »

carussell wrote: post #49
danbruc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a technical term zero-knowledge has a very specific meaning [1] and is not what they are using. Here it is just a marketing term and may confuse people knowing about the technical meaning but that is certainly only a very small fraction of the population and so it is probably not a huge issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Your link is for zero-knowledge proof. They aren't claiming anything in the realm of proofs, zero-knowledge or not. If "zero-knowledge" implicitly meant "zero-knowledge proof", there would be no reason to ever use the latter phrase. Zero-knowledge is an adjective. It's a modifier. It's the "proof" part in "zero-knowledge proof" that's important in describing what it is. "Zero-knowledge" is a property of the method em…

Zero knowledge means a very specific thing in cryptography, and is used exclusively to refer to zero knowledge proofs; in all of cryptographic literature over the past 25 years I have not seen any other usage of "zero knowledge".

Either way, this system isn't "zero knowledge", even if that term were well defined for this situation; you leak file sizes and access patterns.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#86

Post by Ar-Curunir »

bad_user wrote: post #42
danbruc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a technical term zero-knowledge has a very specific meaning [1] and is not what they are using. Here it is just a marketing term and may confuse people knowing about the technical meaning but that is certainly only a very small fraction of the population and so it is probably not a huge issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

That's kind of bullshit though, you can't claim 2 common words from the English language in order to only describe a concept many of us don't understand. I'm a software developer, have been for 15 years, I've stayed fairly awake in college during my cryptography classes, have implemented hashing functions (mentioning this because such a history already place somebody in the 0.01%) and I've never heard of "zero knowle…

Just because people don't know the term doesn't mean cryptographers don't know the term; any cryptographer with any formal cryptography training has heard of the term, and it's not used to refer to any other concept in the cryptographic literature.

The usage of the term matters when it'll be cryptographers reviewing the work; almost every thread about SpiderOak I've seen calls them out on misleading marketing. Hardly good for PR.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#87

Post by conta »

_slwy wrote: post #77

Whenever SpiderOak comes up I can't help but share my experience with them. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading. However I noticed something odd. Accor…

I have to agree that SpiderOak is terrible. Whenever I try to run it, my Mac goes crap. Everything seems to be freezing and OS is not usable at all.

Indeed it seems that they are moving to another products...

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#88

Post by iaml »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #84
iaml wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your target audience is not people who read such forums.

Except when people look for third party reviews of said products, and find threads upon threads of cryptographers calling out SpiderOak for misleading advertisement. Surely that's just bad PR?

It really isn't. For the third party reading this thread only shows that some cryptographers are calling bullshit on semantics of their advertisement, which is more of a nitpick to most people, and some replies from people who say they use it and it's pretty good.

Re: SpiderOakONE – Zero Knowledge Cloud Storage

#90

Post by jbverschoor »

toyg wrote: post #6
jbverschoor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried spider oak a while ago, and I thought it was horrible in terms of ui, performance and bloat. I'm assuming they didn't change their stack/devs, so I will not even try this one.

Depends on how long "a while" ago was. They had a big client overhaul something like a year (?) ago, which (after a few months of bugfixing) made quite a difference. Now they also have a galaxy of related products (IM, collab, etc) which more or less integrate with ONE, although I haven't really used them.

Ah ok.

No it was actually a couple of years ago, more than 3

I might give it a try.

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