SpiderOak One Backup Review

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SpiderOak One Backup is an online backup service with tons of great features, not the least of which is a level of security not seen in many other cloud backup services.

Four online backup plans are offered by SpiderOak CrossClave, all of which are identical, except for the amount of storage you're allowed to use.

This model of pricing in terms of cloud storage space usually makes choosing the right plan pretty straightforward, you can learn more about this and other features in our SpiderOak review.

Below you'll find details on the SpiderOak pricing and plans, you'll get when you sign up, and lots of things we appreciate about the service, as well as some things we don't.

SpiderOak One Plans & Costs

Valid February 2023

Every new user starts off with 250 GB of free storage for 21 days. Be sure to check out our list of Free Online Backup Plans for even more services that offer free backup, especially if you need the plan for longer than just a few weeks—some are even free "forever."

SpiderOak One Backup is available in these four tiers, all of which start off as a 21-day free trial:

SpiderOak One Backup 150 GB

The smallest of the four SpiderOak One Backup plans gets you 150 GB of online storage space. This space can be used for backup from an unlimited number of devices, all of which share in the 150 GB limit.

This plan can be had for $6.00 /month if you pay month to month or for $5.75 /month if you pay for a whole year at once, which comes in at $69.00 /year.

SpiderOak One Backup 400 GB

SpiderOak One Backup 400 GB is the exact same as the other plans offered except that it lets you use up to 400 GB of space for backup from unlimited devices.

Prices are structured like the 150 GB plan: $11.00 /month for month-to-month service or $115.00 /year ($9.58 /month) if you prepay for an entire year up front.

SpiderOak One Backup 2,000 GB

The third level you can choose with SpiderOak One Backup is the 2,000 GB plan, which also gives you access to that much space for, you guessed it, an unlimited number of devices.

SpiderOak One Backup 2,000 GB is $14.00 /month if paid month to month and $149.00 /year ($12.42 /month) if paid yearly.

SpiderOak One Backup 5,000 GB

The last option with SpiderOak One Backup is a 5,000 GB plan for $29.00 /month, or $26.67 /month if it's purchased for a whole year at once, at $320.00. Like the other plans above, this one also includes unlimited devices.

All of SpiderOak's plans also come with a sync feature, which lets you keep two or more folders in sync with one another across all your devices. This feature counts towards your plan storage just as the regular backup feature does.

SpiderOak One Backup Features

Like any good backup service, SpiderOak One Backup keeps your data backed up automatically. Even more, the program never lets you accidentally delete your backed-up files because it keeps them in your account until you manually remove them, which is a feature all backup services should provide.

Here are more features you can expect when you sign up for a SpiderOak plan:

Our Experience With SpiderOak

Any great backup service should be secure, reliable, support great features, and ideally be inexpensive. SpiderOak does a wonderful job tackling those areas.

What We Like

SpiderOak One Backup advertises as being a "no-knowledge" provider. This means you and you alone can access and read your files, which is a big concern for anyone who wants to back up sensitive information. SpiderOak employees have no way to see what files you've backed up, and neither do governments or anyone else who tries to look at your files.

On top of their strong privacy environment, SpiderOak One Backup boasts some awesome features that you'd naturally expect to have in a good backup service.

For starters, you can see in the table above, all of your files are backed up automatically after you've made changes to them. This is extremely important considering the whole reason you're using a backup service is to keep your files safe. There's really no other scheduling preference you want to use if you want to be absolutely sure that your files are being saved. However, SpiderOak One Backup does provide many different scheduling options so you can backup your files exactly when you'd like to.

Also, we love that you can backup from an unlimited number of devices. So long as you stay within your plan's storage limits, you can back up any number of computers you like, regardless of whether they're Mac, Windows, or Linux machines. This means you can get a large plan for your entire family and not have to worry about maxing out your device usage.

One of our favorite features of SpiderOak One Backup is that it supports deduplication. While not that unique in the cloud backup space, it's good to see. This means duplicate files will never be stored in your account, and therefore can never cause excess storage usage.

For an example, if you have a video on your desktop computer and the same exact video on your laptop, both of which are backed up to your SpiderOak account, the video will only take up space as if it were there once. If it's a 2 GB video, no matter how many devices you're backing it up from, it will only use 2 GB of space in your account. This is true for any number of files no matter their file type.

A similar function is worked into the file versioning feature that SpiderOak One Backup supports. Say you have a document on your computer that you're backing up if you open that file, add a few lines to the bottom of it, and save it again, the whole file won't be re-uploaded to your account. Instead, only the changes that were made will be backed up, and the original file will be considered a "Historical Version." This saves time, bandwidth, and storage, and therefore money so you don't have to upgrade to a larger plan as quickly as you otherwise would need to.

Because SpiderOak One Backup keeps just the changes and not the entire file, it can store many, many versions of a file without taking up a lot of space. Meaning, you can make changes to a file over and over again without the worry that you will be forever stuck with a file you've made an accidental change to. You can always just go into the "Historical Versions" section of the program and restore the version you want.

We also like that SpiderOak One supports bandwidth control. Letting it consume as much bandwidth as it wants lets your files upload as fast as possible and, if it's anything like our experience, you won't notice any hiccups or slowdowns during the backup. If you do, however, it's nice to know there are some options here.

Please understand that the speed at which SpiderOak One Backup can upload files will vary from situation to situation because not all network and computer hardware and connections are identical. See our Online Backup FAQ for some more information on this.

Here are a number of other things we liked about SpiderOak One Backup that we thought should be mentioned:

• SpiderOak's support page explains tons of important information regarding security and features, and answers lots of common questions you may have
• Files you're backing up and files that have been deleted can not be permanently removed from any device except, for the one they were originally backed up from
• Interrupted backups resume where they left off once the network connection or program returns to regular functionality
• Backed-up files that you delete from your computer are never deleted from your SpiderOak account unless you manually remove them from the "Deleted Items" section of the program; These files do, however, count toward your used storage.
• Individual versions of a file can be removed from your account to save space
• Files can be easily restored to their original location or you can choose a different folder to save them to
• Synced folders can be created so any file that changes on one computer will be reflected on the other(s) in your account
• Drives, folders, and files can be backed up via the right-click context menu in Windows
• Your files can be downloaded from the SpiderOak website no matter what computer you're using
• Files and folders can be restored to a computer even if they were originally backed up from a different one
• Backups can be configured to skip anything larger than a particular size and/or files older than a certain number of hours/days/months/years
• Entire folders can be excluded from backups if they have a certain name in them
• You can build a list of file extensions that SpiderOak One Backup should ignore when backing up your data
• Not only can individual files be shared, but whole folders can be shared and password protected with anyone, even if they aren't SpiderOak One Backup users
• Your backups can be optionally saved to a local folder or FTP site as well as backed up online so that restoring files are even faster

What We Don't Like

In comparison to what we liked about SpiderOak One Backup, there isn't much that we have to say with regard to disappointments.

We do think that the price is a bit high considering they don't offer an unlimited backup plan. When you look at other popular services, like Backblaze for example, you can see how SpiderOak One Backup compares. That service offers an unlimited plan that's around the same price as SpiderOak's 150 GB plan.

However, as with any software or service you subscribe to, it's important to compare every aspect of them. When you do so, you'll see that the features are very different. Backblaze, for instance, doesn't support unlimited versioning or unlimited devices, two big pluses in SpiderOak's plans.

SpiderOak One Backup lets you limit bandwidth usage, so you're not overwhelming your network with file transfers, but only for the upload bandwidth. You're not able to define a limit for how fast SpiderOak One Backup can download files, which, while not a huge deal, is too bad.

Final Thoughts on SpiderOak One Backup

SpiderOak One Backup is a fantastic choice, especially if you have a number of computers to back up from and you don't have several TBs of data among them.

If SpiderOak One doesn't check all the boxes you were after with a cloud backup plan then we highly recommend you read reviews of some of our other favorites.

In particular, we're big fans of Backblaze and Carbonite.