For the typical home user on a regular DSL/Broadband connection, data uploads to SpiderOak 1 GB per hour, or 24 GB per day. This assumes no other very upload-intensive tasks are running at the same time. Upload speeds will vary greatly depending on your geographical location and bandwidth. Users with a lot of data that will compress and de-duplicate well or who are on a very fast internet connection may experience better upload speeds. At the same time, users in remote areas or those with slow connections could experience slower upload speeds.
Backing up data using the SpiderOak application involves a number of processing steps before data is uploaded. Each file is copied to an appdata directory, deduplicated against what has already been backed up, encrypted, and compressed before it can be uploaded. This means that the time to upload a file not only depends on the available network bandwidth, but also on the performance of the machine the file is being backed up from. Often, the backup seems to start slow (as the client gathers data about the backup set) and then speeds up as the process progresses. This is also related to why an upload time estimate is not shown in the application. Files are processed linearly and attempting to calculate a time estimate before starting the upload would greatly lengthen the overall backup time. Additionally, with our compression and account-wide deduplication of files, the amount of data that needs to be uploaded is almost always less than the ‘on-disk’ storage space that it takes up on a device. Any time estimate made before the files are processed would be inaccurate.