The web has become littered with services offering to backup your precious files and data. There are television ad campaigns and blog-stacking galore to temp you into this or that “free” service.
Some of them are down right scary while others are just not quite as they appear.
SpiderOak.com provides one such online backup service, including a free membership with 2 gigabytes of storage. It is a solution that is very much worth your consideration.
First, we acknowledge that our own Privacy Policy Library has made explicit note of a serious failure in the SpiderOak website privacy policy-terms of use. But it is imperative to understand that the highlighted provision applies only to use and interaction with the web site and does not in any way affect the privacy of any data you might store on the SpiderOak servers.
The silly clause is unnecessarily expansive and unfortunately can be misunderstood to apply to the underlying service. Why the company would not simply revoke the thing and replace it with a non-exclusive, needs-based license is probably a function of lawyers and not of the service team. We regret the existence of the clause because this is a genuinely good service with real privacy protection for online backups.
We have investigated a number of online storage providers and SpiderOak has gone to greater lengths than any to not only claim your data is safe from their prying eyes, but actually demonstrate the technology that achieves that goal.
SpiderOak’s technology is largely Open Source so that technical programmers anywhere would spot any hidden backdoors. SpiderOak goes into detail explaining how their system works; how the securing of your data is actually done. There are accessible explanations on the web site that a moderately technical reader can fully appreciate.
For higher demand consumers or businesses, the normal buying issues also weigh in favor of SpiderOak.
Ease-of-use is a critical consideration for online backup services. If the system provided is not genuinely easy to use, there is no point in using a special service because you almost certainly already have access to FTP storage that is going unused.
SpiderOak sports an attractive interface that allows the very simplest of configuration, or individual file selection. Backups can come from any local or network drive so you can backup your kids computers to the same account.
SpiderOak also provides attractive and easy-to-follow video tutorials to get you going.
On a price basis, 100 gigabytes is $100/year accessible from any computer. Competitors such as Moby sound less expensive with rates promoted at around $5.00 per month, but those rates are computer-specific. So, if you have three computers you will be looking at $15.00 per month.
Reliability is always an important question. If you are a free user, your data is subject to deletion without warning, should the service decide you have abused it. More interestingly, if you are a paid user, even if the service deems you have abused the service, SpiderOak will provide you at least 60 days to download any of your data before they wipe the account.
There are also a lot of questionable services offered, some of which we will review more completely in the near future. From what we have seen so far, the 2 gigabyte free SpiderOak account is a strong recommendation.
As for the transferring ownership of any feedback, etc, forever to be used however they want, the solution is simple: use the service and don’t submit any comments, feedback or other content.
