June 14, 2013

How SpiderOak deleted my files!

 
I have been happy user of SpiderOak until now, this happened today. I have two machines (let's call them Ana and Bill) that sync one folder, and on first one (Ana) I added one new folder with arround 2GB of data to upload, as it was over 512Kb/s upload link I left it over night.
 
Next morning I saw that first Ana has finished upload, but I couldn't find data in synced folder on Bill, that was strange, that neven happened before. When I noticed that Bill was acting strangly (Firefox freezing up) I investigated and saw that I ran out of space on my /home partition. No big deal, I moved one directory to other disk and restarted SpiderOak.
 
I also noticed one really big file called something like "SpiderOak cache" or something similar. From that it was obvious that SpiderOak started syncing the directory, but but it looks like SpiderOak doesn't sync one file at a time but whole directory. Sync process got stuck when it ran out of space.
 
When I restarted SpiderOak that huge file on Bill was gone, but then then I looked on Ana and the original directory has also been removed, now alarms started doing off! It looks like sync went in wrong direction. Instead of transfering data from Ana to Bill, when SpiredOak got stuck on Bill and didn't transfer whole directory then deleted temporary file but also sent command to delete that directory back to Ana!
 
This is really bad!
 
I'm reading on SpiderOak blog that data is never deleted, but I can't find it anywhere! Help! Where is this "Garbage bin" that they talk about?
 
UPDATE:
SpiderOak engineers and support helped me to restore my files back. Thank you a lot!