our review (continued)
The setup is very straightforward and the first thing you specify is whether you are a new user or want to add another computer to your account. Using multiple computers on the same account is not a new idea, but very few providers offer this solution. This is a big plus in my mind. After I chose the new user option I was asked for my name, email, computer name, username, password, and password hint. At this point you have to accept their password policy which is “SPIDEROAK WILL NEVER KNOW YOUR PASSWORD AND, THEREFORE, WILL NEVER HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR DATA..”. This is a very good indicator that your data is secure. They go on to say “TO RETRIEVE THE DATA YOU HAVE STORED ON SPIDEROAK, YOUR PASSWORD IS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED. PLEASE MAKE A RECORD OF THE PASSWORD THAT YOU HAVE SELECTED. SHOULD YOU FORGET YOUR PASSWORD, SPIDEROAK WILL STORE A ‘PASSWORD HINT’ TO HELP YOU RECOVER YOUR PASSWORD.” The next step in the setup process was to prove that I was human by entering some text that was shown in a picture. I do have some complaints about this. The first is that I was still in the local setup app not on a website and secondly they were hard to read and I went through about 4 of them before I finally got it right. Kind of annoying. Anyway after that I was informed that some cryptographic keys were being generated and then I was all set. By the way, after I created my account I still had to go check my email and click on the activate account URL that I had received from SpiderOak. I don’t think that I would’ve been able to start the backup without verifying my email.
After my account was created the local client application popped up and prompted me to select what I would like to backup. 
I like the selections on the left of common categories like documents or pictures. This is not a new idea, but it is the cleanest implementation that I’ve seen so far and it worked quite well. I chose to backup only my documents (about 265MB) by clicking on the “Documents” category and then saved that selection. When I clicked on the status tab I saw a list of files with a percentage complete for each file. It took about an hour and a half for the full backup to complete. The client is very clean and easy to navigate. There are tabs: backup, view, status & share. On the backup tab there is a tree control that allows you to pick the folders and files that you want backed up. The view tab shows you what you currently have backed up and also allows you to download any of those files (restore). You can also see the number of versions that have been backed up as well as the dates of the file changes. You can restore any version that you want. The status tab shows you any current backup activity as well as past events via a log button. The share tab allows you to setup share rooms to share any files with family, friends, or any other associates.
One minor usability complaint is that when you go to close the client you get this silly dialog that asks whether you want to close or minimize the client application. 
This is one of those decisions that you just don’t need to put on the user. They’ve already decided to use your backup solution and so why would you want them to shut it down. Even though they do a good job of explaining the options you just don’t need it. One other thing that this exposes is that since they are not running their client as a service then if you happen to logout of Windows then automatic backups won’t happen. I would prefer that they run it as a service—it just makes sense for these types of apps. You can click on the box that tells SpiderOak not to bring up the dialog again and then choose your action and that action will become default.
The web access to your saved files is really straightforward. Just login to spideroak.com and you are presented with a simple interface. You can browse through each folder and select single files to download or download complete folders. When I tried to download a file with multiple revisions it just defaulted to the latest version. It appears that you can’t download specific versions from the web, only from the client interface. 
That’s a little disappointing, but not that big of a deal. I will say that the web interface was probably the easiest that I’ve used so far to navigate and retrieve files. I was also impressed that I could download folders so easily and quickly. I started a download of my entire documents folder and it immediately began downloading a zip file with all of the folders and files. It took less than 10 minutes to download 265MB and everything looked fine once it was downloaded. One minor cosmetic issue on the web interface is that if you display the files in list view then there are %20 (used in URLs to encode spaces) everywhere there should be spaces. It looks a bit messy.
SpiderOak has the ability to share entire folders of files with other users. You create what you call a ShareRoom and a ShareKey and then specify a folder or folders that will be added to that ShareRoom. You can’t specify individual files. 
Once you create the ShareRoom you can get there two different ways: a unique URL or login to a share off of spideroak.com. Being able to share files is becoming more and more popular and I like this feature. I did find it to be more complex than it needed to be and I found myself thinking that the way that Memopal allows individual files to be shared with one click seems much more practical. I thought that there would be a bit more security involved (like a password or something), but if you know the URL you can get to the files. This is probably fine for most situations.
Overall, SpiderOak is a nice solution. It is a bit pricey compared to other solutions, but they do allow you to backup multiple computers on the same account. They also provide file sharing which is a nice add on. There are a few rough edges, like the minimize or close dialog described above, but it seems that SpiderOak is a viable option for online backup.
Addendum (April 16, 2009)
SpiderOak updated my client software to include a new tab called “Sync”. 
They now allow you to “Keep folders in constant synchronization across multiple machines and locations”. For some people this could be the feature that tips the scale. For me it is a nice to have, but I like to see innovation and movement.