> Another benefit of SpiderOak is that they de-duplicate your data, so you may end up using less space on SpiderOak than you do on your own machine.
This benefit soon disappears due to two reasons:
1. If your files change, SpiderOak saves versions of them indefinitely, with each taking up space (of course, all the deltas and stuff). There is no simple way to set it up so that file versions older than X days/years get deleted. The SpiderOak client is completely useless if you want to delete older versions of files because you'd have to wade through all your directories and subdirectories looking for files with multiple versions.
2. The SpiderOak client has also been buggy and ends up creating file versions of unchanged files too (like photos you may have saved once on your computer and never touched). So there's no easy way for you to get to specific places where files have several versions stored and do some cleanup.
This cleanup of older versions matters a lot more if you have a smaller account quota, lesser free space on your account, and you're not willing to pay for the $129 a year 1TB option that is heavily pushed (compared to the other tiers) by skewed pricing on SpiderOak's part.
Overall, SpiderOak is still better though. Dropbox is more dishonest in its approach to deduplication. Dropbox dedpulicates data across user accounts (so if you and I store the same free eBook from Project Gutenberg on our Dropbox accounts, Dropbox saves only one copy) and deduplicates data within your user account for files you may have replicated across folders. But in both the cases it treats your space quota as if deduplication is not done at all, effectively charging you for more than the space you're actually using.
1. If your files change, SpiderOak saves versions of them indefinitely, with each taking up space (of course, all the deltas and stuff). There is no simple way to set it up so that file versions older than X days/years get deleted. The SpiderOak client is completely useless if you want to delete older versions of files because you'd have to wade through all your directories and subdirectories looking for files with multiple versions.
2. The SpiderOak client has also been buggy and ends up creating file versions of unchanged files too (like photos you may have saved once on your computer and never touched). So there's no easy way for you to get to specific places where files have several versions stored and do some cleanup.
This cleanup of older versions matters a lot more if you have a smaller account quota, lesser free space on your account, and you're not willing to pay for the $129 a year 1TB option that is heavily pushed (compared to the other tiers) by skewed pricing on SpiderOak's part.
Overall, SpiderOak is still better though. Dropbox is more dishonest in its approach to deduplication. Dropbox dedpulicates data across user accounts (so if you and I store the same free eBook from Project Gutenberg on our Dropbox accounts, Dropbox saves only one copy) and deduplicates data within your user account for files you may have replicated across folders. But in both the cases it treats your space quota as if deduplication is not done at all, effectively charging you for more than the space you're actually using.