Quick review of SpiderOakONE

6 August 2015, 01:32

I’ve a troubled history with the SpiderOak backup software. I like it in principle and used it for several years until earlier this year when the irritating bugs and quirks of the service drove me away.

There’s a new client app out — SpiderOakONE — and it comes with claimed improvements to the backend that should make things faster.

The new Mac client certainly looks prettier than it did but there aren’t many (any?) new features. Here are some questions for SpiderOak developers that sadly don’t have happy answers:

  1. Still no option to automatically backup iCloud data? This is the 21st century, isn’t it?
  2. Why does the “Mail” default backup option only backup the Mail app and not, for example, Outlook mail?
  3. Still no two-factor authentication outside the US and Canada? Why is it still considered a “test” feature?
  4. Still no way to see instantly what’s about to be backed up, other than wading through file listing trees like this is 1995? (And with hidden files on view, this is a nightmare.)
  5. Why has the option to make the SpiderOak menu bar icon black been taken away? Now it animates in an even more distracting way!
  6. Still no help files or help buttons? What the f*** is “flap control”?
  7. Still no way to set any kind of alarm of notification to tell me if backup hasn’t happened properly for a while?
  8. Still no way to adjust the size of the file listing column in order to see the full file and path?
  9. Energy impact: SpiderOak’s at the top in Activity Monitor! Still no option to disable or limit when on battery power?

Know better?

 
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