So openSUSE 11.3 comes with the SpiderOak client ready to install from the repos.
If you haven’t seen it, SO is an online backup and sync service, the big advantage compared to competing services like Dropbox is the zero-knowledge approach: everything is encrypted right on your machine, all they can know is how much data you are saving.
You get 2 GB for free, but they have a referral program where both parties get 1 GB extra. Here’s my referrer link, if you use it to sign up you start with 3GB and I get 1 GB extra too, win-win.
Bonus space for free accounts is limited to 3 GB (for a total of 5), if others want to post their referral links too, I’ll remove mine once I hit the 3 gig bonus, so everyone can benefit.
I forgot one important point:
For the referral to work you need to click the link of course, this sets a special cookie. When registering your account provide a valid email. You need to open the verification email using your email providers web interface with the same browser and click the verification link with said cookie still alive.
Not getting any hits, huh? Your first post looks like advertising, and I think people here are a little wiser than to follow spam links. I’m surprised the moderators haven’t removed it.
If you would take just one short second to actually look at that link you would see that it really leads to the official spideroak webpage. But, yes, it’s kind of an advertisement, with everyone gaining something I see only benefits though.
On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:06:01 +0000, chief sealth wrote:
> I’m
> surprised the moderators haven’t removed it.
Not quite as concerned about a referral message like this (not really a
‘spam’ profile, but I checked it out). We did have a short discussion
about it, and I think if it had shown up in more places than just here,
it would’ve set off my spidey-sense, but also tempusfugit has posted
several messages that provided actual help or asked real questions, which
also doesn’t really fit the typical ‘spammer’ profile.
Since this is the general-chit-chat forum, it got left without comment,
but that doesn’t mean it’s open season for spammers to post here, either
just that we have some criteria and things we look for, and this post/
thread didn’t rise to that criteria level.
(Of course, saying what that criteria is would tell the spammers how to
evade it, so I’m not going to do that either <g>).
Why don’t you simply use Wuala? You can get as much space as you want completely free and it’s cross-platform, unlike spideroak, which you can’t use in another OS with the same account.
Of course, there are also paying subscriptions available for those who can’t participate in (space) trading.
I hadn’t heard about Wuala before, interesting concept, but as far as I can see you need to have a pretty high uptime or share a lot of your own harddrive space to get to regions where it becomes viable.
Regarding cross-platform usage: spideroak is available for Linux, Mac, Win, has an iphone client and is of course usable with the same account on all platforms, that’s about as cross-platform as I care about. (Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with them in any way, really.)
I’m sorry if I have so much as barely tickled the spam sensors, I really thought we could get an exchange going here, but obviously there is not that much interest anyway. One person has used the referral so far, thank you kind stranger and have fun with your extra space.
If you all have noticed, none of us mods have stepped in and moderated this thread by deleting the post or the link. We don’t consider this spam. Why? It is a featured app in 11.3 and I, for one, see nothing wrong with users trying to promote the app and gain extra storage. As has been mentioned, it’s a win-win situation.
All right, my judgement might have been rash, and I’m sorry about that. But promoting a private service and seeking referals just seemed a little bit out of the scope of the forums.
On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:06:01 +0000, chief sealth wrote:
> All right, my judgement might have been rash, and I’m sorry about that.
> But promoting a private service and seeking referals just seemed a
> little bit out of the scope of the forums.
It would be considered so in the support areas, certainly.
But an established user looking for a referral that’s relevant to
openSUSE (and software included in it) is a little different. If it were
someone looking for a referral bonus for a commercial telephony service
(I know of one that does that), that might be a different matter because
it lacks relevance to openSUSE and to Linux.
I’ve read in a review that Spideroak is not as reliable as it sounds. It seems that you will lose all your backup files if your OS fails and refuses to start, as the file structure is tightly integrated with your OS’s. Though, it was a while ago that I read this review. Just search the net a bit to find more about the (dis)advantages.
And yes, Wuala requires you to have as much uptime as possible, that is if you want to keep using it for free. There are also paying subscriptions available, as I’ve said before, and they are not really expensive for what’s it worth. And additionaly you can get up to a certain amount for free by referring others.
Also note that Wuala’s concept is the most reliable. All your files are split into certain chunks and distributed to worldwide locations. This almost guarantees that nor hardware failures nor natural disasters would cause a risk to you losing your files. Note that I said almost because there are also the Wuala databases, which store all the important information, and I’m not aware of how reliable their systems are but I’d like to find it out any time soon. Also, no user will be able to decrypt your files as everything’s encrypted on the client side and split into chunks.
All you need to get your data is the client and you login credentials. The files can also be acquired through their web interface, but that of course kills the zero-knowledge part.
Wuala sounds interesting, but I think I am sticking with Dropbox for the time being.
One feature I like, and I haven’t heard of any of the other systems to have it, is to synchronize over LAN. If you have multiple computers on your LAN and one computer add/edit/deletes a file, instead of Computer1 uploading the file to Dropbox and then download it to Computer2, Computer1 uploades to Dropbox and Dropbox informs Computer2 of the updated file and tells it to get it from Computer1 directly.
I know Dropbox isn’t perfect, but it works for the way I do things (so far). Always handy to know what’s available though.
SpiderOak lets me easily backup, sync, share, remotely access and store all my data. I can add as many different computers and drives to a single account so all my data can live in a central location. The application has been working for me very nicely. You can sign up if you use the download link below and we will both receive an additional free 1 GB of storage. And you can also feel free to refer as many friends as you like. https://spideroak.com/download/referral/4b45441744da1e2594e73340d41e2553
P.S. If you use the WORLDBACKUPDAY promo code you can gain 6 GB in total.