If you are having difficulty downloading a file or folder via the SpiderOak One or Groups application, try these suggestions.
Confirm that you are using the application to download and not the web interface. The web interface is fine for convenient access to individual files that aren't too large. But for reliable access to big files or folders, downloading via the SpiderOak backup application on your computer will give better results.
Confirm that you are using the latest version of the application. If needed, download and install the latest version of One or Groups.
Confirm that you are following our best practices for using the One or Groups application to download files and folders.
Confirm that the application reports that it is connected to our servers. If it is not, or if you notice it cycling between being connected and disconnected, see our article Disconnected to learn how to fix this. Bad connectivity will interfere with downloading.
Confirm that your uploads are working correctly and that your files are backed up. If neither uploads nor downloads work, the most likely cause is a connectivity problem.
If the application is giving you error messages or other notifications that you do not expect, contact us with the exact text or a screenshot of the message.
If the troublesome download is a single file, you can select it in the Manage tab, then press the Link button. You will be given a link to download the file directly. If the file exceeds our recommended maximum size, generating a file sharing link could well take so long that the application concludes that the process failed and show you an error message. Our advice is to not back up or try to download files larger than One and Groups are intended for. However, a workaround is to attempt to create a file sharing link, and allow it fail. Wait one hour, then try again. In some cases the second attempt will succeed, using the cached results from the previous attempt.
If the download is large enough that you might leave the computer working unattended, then set your computer to not go to sleep or turn off during periods of user inactivity. If the computer is asleep or off then its applications are too, SpiderOak and its download included. As a safety measure you will probably want to also set the computer to lock the screen and keyboard, and to require the operating system's password after a few minutes of keyboard inactivity. Once you download what you need, you can return your computer to its normal settings.
Do not select the volume root to download, but rather its contents. For example if you want to download the entirety of an external disk F:, don't select F:. Open up F: and select everything one level down.
If you have more than one computer in your account, attempt the download from each of them. Downloading and decrypting via SpiderOak is resource intensive, so you will get best results using a computer with a fast processor, abundant memory and free disk space, and that is not overly burdened with other resource-intensive tasks.
One and Groups do not impose any limits on download size, but things out of our control (network conditions, your hardware, etc.) do in unpredictable ways. For that reason, only smaller downloads might work for you. Trial and error will be needed to determine the largest download that reliably works for you, but we recommend starting with a download selection of less than 10 GB. It may be useful to attempt to download a single small file to determine the scope of the downloading problem.
Apropos the previous two paragraphs, if you have a lot of data to download and multiple computers at your disposal, put them all to work downloading different portions of the total data required. The bottleneck is usually not network speed but the receiving computer's ability to swiftly stage and decrypt, so distributing that across several computers often helps.