SpiderOak vs. Dropbox

Recently I made the switch to backing up my important documents on SpiderOak. The main motivation was security concerns about Dropbox - SpiderOak uses unique per-user encryption keys whereas Dropbox posses the keys. I trust SpiderOak with sensitive data (e.g. tax returns) because they haven't dropped the ball on security like Dropbox has.

Furthermore, I suspect that I should have been using SpiderOak all along. Whereas Dropbox aims for simplicity and syncs one directory across multiple machines, SpiderOak allows the user to configure backups and shares with various settings for multiple directories on a per-machine basis. This makes SpiderOak quite a bit more powerful but also more complicated than Dropbox.

At the moment, I have one directory sync, so SpiderOak behaves quite a bit like Dropbox. But in the future I may explore syncing individual directories of interest, such as Pidgin chat logs - SpiderOak can sync the work machines, leaving my home desktop out of the picture.