So, with life descending on me with the fury of Justin Bieber when he realizes his tattoos make no sense, I’ve been out of some loops and ignoring others. Just finally checked some emails and found out that Cubby is going away? What the heck. Time to move everything to yet ANOTHER service. Anyway, I recently took advantage of a discounted price on the cloud service Zoolz. It SEEMS to do automated updating of changed files on your computer, similar to Cubby and Dropbox. I’ve done a couple of test runs with some unimportant files, and everything appears to work, but the devil is in the dot-com, as they say.
My question, therefore, is whether anyone here uses Zoolz for their cloud backup process and has any advice or cautions they’d be willing to provide? I think this might be a decent alternative (and a heck of a lot cheaper – 1TB lifetime storage for less than $50, no monthly subscription), but now that I’m writing again, I don’t want to commit myself to a system that will devour my thoughts and dreams the way GDrive does.
I don’t know about Zoolz, but with the demise of Cubby, I’m using Sync—www.sync.com—to work with my collaborators in China, where Dropbox is blocked. It works fine on my Mac, but I’m getting the impression that she—Windows user—is having problems with new automatic saves happening before the previous one has finished uploading. I suspect this is down to the GFWoC slowing down the process, so have asked her to make the pause triggering an automatic save much longer.
I’ll check out Zoolz from the Mac point of view, in case Sync + GFWoC continues to be causing too many conflicts.
I read what everyone was saying about Sync in the RIP Cubby thread and might have gone with that if I hadn’t already put some money down on Zoolz (and still might, if this doesn’t work out). But when I see 1TB of online storage space for a single payment of $30, I take it. If it doesn’t play well with active projects like Cubby does (did), I might use it simply for zipped backups. I’ll do some “beta” testing and give updates as I remember.
I was looking at the Zoolz website, where I could only find expensive business offerings—£240 per year for 1TB—when one of their bods named Tamara started a chat session. She told me that they had “Home accounts”, so I explained why I was checking out their website, but I mentioned China and when I sent my message she ended the chat session without a word. So for me, it seems I have no future with Zoolz.
I do have space on SpiderOak, which I set up way back in about 2007, the first time Dropbox was blocked in China. I can access it, but half the space is taken up with files in the trash which I can’t clear as I no longer have the machine I was using at the time so, because of the encryption system, they are off-limits to me. SpiderOak has also changed its UI, much more Mac-like—back then it was obviously a Linux-style front end—but they too only seem to have a subscription model, and as I have enough space on Dropbox and Sync for my collaboration needs, plus 50GB on iCloud of which I’m currently only using 1.26GB, and more almost entirely unused space on Google Drive—wished on me by my daughter!—I don’t need any more!
Actually, you can get it all back. I really like Spideroak as a BACKUP System. If there are any files on that old computer’s backup which you do not have, download them to a place within your current machine’s backup folders. Then delete the entire old computer.
If you are like me, you already did that before you retired the old computer, so the old computer’s backups are redundant. More space can be reclaimed by purging excess previous versions. I wrote a batch file for that instructions and explanation. https://steveshank.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?aid=719
Thanks @Steveshank, I’ll bear that in mind to explore when I have some free time. At the moment things are too fraught. I liked SpiderOak and its encryption system, but I found the UI irritating back then—as I had to ‘think differently’ —and I also found I was always running out of space. It was in 2007 when I first started using Scrivener, and each time Scrivener did an automatic save, the previous version was being moved into trash where it would build up until I purged it manually when I ran into trouble.
Then Dropbox suddenly became available again and I forgot about SpiderOak once I’d moved the files I needed back into Dropbox … but I didn’t remember to clear the files out of the trash.
For security, I don’t think Spideroak can be beat.
About 2 years ago they redid the UI and made it MUCH more friendly.
Trash can now be emptied with a simple click on the Trash Can labeled with the word “Empty”.
Previous versions is what causes the issue. Even though previous versions are compressed and only deltas, they can still accumulate. I just checked and I have 136 previous versions of my most common scrivener project. Previous versions can be controlled by increasing the frequency of backups (mine is set to hourly) or by purging. I’ll click on an icon for my batch file, it will close spideroak, run a purge keeping 10 daily copies, 10 weekly copies, 12 monthly copies and 1 a year after that. Then restart spideroak. I don’t understand why they haven’t put this kind of system into the UI for the program. It is really the biggest problem with this cloud backup. It really reeks havoc with Outlook PST files, big Quickbooks files, and encrypted vault files like veracrypt. Daily backups or once every 8 hours works better for those people.
I’m not sure how you do batch files on a Mac, but I assume there is some way to automate command line commands.
You could very well be correct. But if that happens, I’m out $30 bucks for however long it let me store up to 1TB of data on the service. That’s a pretty good “rental” fee. Regardless, I’ve never relied solely on cloud services for backups. They’re primarily for multiple-device access to my files, as I have a hard time holding onto flash drives if they’re not secured physically to my body in some way. With Cubby going away, this is simply me hoping to have found a suitable option for such work.
I’ve greatly enjoyed DropBox for several years now; and it’s the only service I’m aware of that is supported by most Linux distributions. That said, I’ve hit their free account limits several times & had to cull/delete the deadwood. Sync has proven to be dependable, with larger free account storage. Sadly, Sync does not support Linux.
Some long time back, about the time of the online upheaval of the US Gov’t demanding access to user accounts on offshore storage vaults of US services, I found an offshore storage service hosted by a French company, thus out of reach of US demands. Hubic.com offers 25GB free home-account storage space, with a web browser interface. It’s no DropBox or Sync, but it is good alternative for secure, locker-style parking of encrypted personal archival files one wishes not to lose in event of a home disaster.
Looks interesting, so I may have to give it a try. Funny, I was looking at the offers, and the paid ones all say “so much including VAT/month” and I’m wondering what VAT is. Encryption? Some kind of cold storage? Nope, it’s the taxes. Silly euros
