You can share files with other people, similar to the way you can with Dropbox. That might indicate that encryption is done per-file (which is actually a little less secure, so who knows).<p>I haven&#x27;t researched it, but it could work like this: scan the local machine, find duplicates, upload unique files, and then create links to any place a file is duplicated. It all happens locally, so only encrypted data is ever uploaded. Some tiny bit of info about the structure of the file system might be transferred and known by SpiderOak, but I can&#x27;t conceive of a situation where that matters.