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SpiderOak...alas...

raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
edited May 2012 in General

I've been playing with SpiderOak on a VPS. They offer continuous, versioned backups with no bandwidth charge. All of that is nice:

  • continuous so that everything is always caught (not just a "nightly backup")
  • versioned so it's not just an rsync that is overwritten every night
  • no worries on bandwidth charges

I was just playing with the free 2GB tier just to get started, with only a couple directories setup. This is on a Virtuozzo VPS. I configured one directory (/home on a cpanel/WHM server) for protection - it has 500MB of disk and 55,000 files.

Pros:

  • well-documented
  • pretty well explained and thought out
  • CLI-friendly

Cons:

  • the client has a memory leak. My VPS idles at ~100MB (with cpanel, etc. running) and after a few days of SpiderOak running, it got up to 400MB. Kill SpiderOak and it drops to 100MB.

  • the client is a hideous CPU hog. I'd frequently see it up to 99% of one CPU in top. I decided to switch to "batchmode" where it would run more like a traditional backup. Checked the logs this morning and it ran at 99.9% CPU from 3am to 3:28am last night. For 500MB / 55K files? Sheesh.

  • the "continuous backup" is neat, but it chews through your backup disk space very quickly - not surprising, since in a sense whenever you save a file you're creating a new backup of it on SpiderOak. But then when you do something like a purge (because I only want to retain so many days of history), you're back to a long 99% CPU run.

Opened a thread in the SO forum to see if perhaps I'm missing something or these are known problems being address. But barring a fix I don't think I'll be sticking with SO.

Comments

  • RaymiiRaymii Member

    Ever checked tarsnap? https://www.tarsnap.com/ (I use that on some servers)
    I've used spideroak on the desktop a lot, and i can confirm the memory hog. I now use Wuala, and that also has it. Spideroak also kept a local bacup of everything, so I had a hundred gigs extra (because it encrypts the blocks) space wasted. But overall, I like it a lot. I've switched to Wuala because of the price and the memory eating is a little less.

    Recently amazon dropped the s3 upload cost i think, so you could just put the shit on amazon...

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Yes, I love tarsnap. But way too expensive for daily backup use.

    I use S3 as well but you can never have too many backups :-)

  • RaymiiRaymii Member

    tarsnap is indeed quite pricy, and now amazon has dropped the upload prices so if it is only for the costs go to amazon..

    And indeed, you can never have enough backups

  • vrillusionsvrillusions Member

    I've used spideroak for quite a while now on my (physical) servers where memory isn't as huge an issue. Still run in batchmode though. So far what I've done for VPSs is rsync the data to my home computer which then runs spideroak to back it up. Because yeah, it's a memory hog.

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