We will no longer use the phrase “zero knowledge” to describe our software
I still won&#x27;t trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful.<p>I&#x27;ll post my usual story:<p>In February 2016, SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12&#x2F;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.<p>However I noticed something odd. According to my Mac&#x27;s activity monitor, SpiderOak was only uploading in short bursts [0] of ~2MB&#x2F;s. I did some test uploads to other services (Google Drive, Amazon) to verify that things were fine with my connection (they were) and then contacted support (Feb 10).<p>What followed was nearly <i>6 months</i> of &quot;support&quot;, first claiming that it might be a server side issue and moving me &quot;to a new host&quot; (Feb 17) then when that didn&#x27;t resolve my issue, they ignored me for a couple of months then handed me over to an engineer (Apr 28) who told me: &quot;we may have your uploads running at the maximum speed we can offer you at the moment. Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading&quot;<p>At this point I ran a basic test (cat &#x2F;dev&#x2F;urandom | gzip -c | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass pass:spideroak | pv | shasum -a 256 &gt; &#x2F;dev&#x2F;zero) that showed my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it (Apr 30) after which I was simply ignored for a full month until I opened another ticket asking for a refund (Jul 9).<p>I really love the idea of secure, private storage but SpiderOak&#x27;s client is barely functional and their customer support is rather bad.<p>If you want a service like theirs, I&#x27;d suggest rolling your own. Rclone [1] and Syncany [2] are both open source and support end to end encryption and a variety of storage backends.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;XEvhIop.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;XEvhIop.png</a><p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rclone.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rclone.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syncany.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syncany.org&#x2F;</a>