| FYI, the reason the big backup providers don't do "standard protocol access" is because it's actually far more expensive to provide. Take for example, the case of backing up a folder full of files using rsync over ssh, vs. using the SpiderOak client. Every time you run a backup job, rsync must examine the local folder _and_ ask the server to examine the remote folder, so it can make conclusions about what needs to be transferred. In short, to do a new backup (a write operations) many reads are also required. Furthermore, those reads tend to be non-sequential (seeking to a bunch of different inodes to stat files, etc.) If you compare that to the SpiderOak client, it already has a near real-time accurate database of exactly what exists on the server. There's no need to burden the server with a bunch of disk seeks (or any actually) to assess what needs to be done. In short, the backup operation can be accomplished by the server using mostly sequential IO, writing only, because of this added intelligence in the client. Aggregated across a large population of users, this difference in usage patterns greatly influences the hardware requirements and therefore the cost per GB. ...and by the way SpiderOak will run on just about any platform that Python will, with or without a GUI. |