[shuttertalk]

I spotted this online at lifehacker and tomshardware, so apologies if it turns out to be a dodgy deal but it sounds very attractive indeed. Then again, you know what they say about things that sound too good...

Anyway, this is a "new" (I'll explain in a minute) online backup provider, and the premise is that they are offering a tiered service, with their free product being good for backing up 1 computer, up to 512 GB of data, with mac and windows support. The next plan up offers 5 computers and unlimited backups at $3 a month, while their largest plan at $5 a month gives you unlimited computers/space and 512GB of "Briefcase" space. This is basically a cloud sync service like Dropbox, Sugarsync and iCloud, which syncs a copy of the data between all your devices.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/backify...13695.html

Just to give you and idea of the attractiveness of the pricing, I am currently a paid user of Sugarsync, and for the equivalent $5 a month I only get 30GB of storage which allows me to fit my documents only but not my photo library. Dropbox charges $9.99 for their most basic paid plan, and gives 50GB of space. Feature-wise, they offer mac and windows clients, plus iphone and android as well for mobile devices, and you can also use FTP/webdav to transfer files and also access your files online via their website. I'm not sure whether the last bits apply to their free accounts or only to their briefcase space.

Given this is a new service, there's not much to go by in terms of reviews. Looking a bit deeper, some of the comments mention that they are just a livedrive.com reseller and I can find online reviews of Livedrive from as far back as 2009 at least. They recently launched mac support earlier this year, and some comments from as late as may 2011 this year mention problems with their mac software though.


Anyway, I might give their free plan a go, as you might have read in the past that I've been on the lookout for an online backup solution as a secondary, offsite copy of my data. I am already covered quite well for regular local backups to an external drive (thanks time machine) and also periodically to portable drives, and wouldn't trust an online provider as a primary means of backup. But it would be nice to have an additional offsite copy for extreme circumstances - i.e. fire or theft of my primary backups.

[Pavel]

There are other free and low cost services around. I looked into a few of them. The problem is the upload speed, which would not keep up with my photo generation, let alone with backing up the few terabytes I already have. Untill the upload speeds improve, this is a great solution for those with small, slowly evolving and growing data. I do not see it as a solution for those that record music, video or take photos.

[shuttertalk]

That is a valid concern. The last time I tried crashplan (from the previous thread), it didn't get anywhere near finishing my library before the one month trial was up. I think the estimate was something like 3-6 months. I wouldn't go so far as to say that that it's not suitable for someone who takes photos though, and some providers are faster than others in terms of transfer speeds.

Some providers offer seeding by sending them an external drive but this its usually limited to within the US.

[NT73]

let alone with backing up the few terabytes I already have.

Not knocking anything here, but I wonder how many Photo's of the paper kind would be stored in a pro photographers premises before digital.?
And if it would be the equivalent of terabytes. And what would be the cost of that.?


When I was a child all the family photo's were stored in a biscuit tin and probably a couple of albums. And a large (20cm x 16 at a guess) portrait of my grandfather in a fancy wooden gilt frame. :/

[shuttertalk]

Hey all, although I signed up for an account, I didn't actually use it, which turns out to be for the best.

A few days ago, they sent out an email saying that they are no longer offering free accounts, and would be closing them. Then I received an email from them today:

We are writing to you in regards to the recent action taken by LiveDrive to close your backup/briefcase account.

Backify used to be a reseller for LiveDrive.com's services. Recently we were having some issues with their serive and they were literally unable to provide a solution to our problems. More information about these issues can be read on our homepage at www.backify.com. Tired of the service provided by LiveDrive, we asked them to close our reseller account. It may be noted that at no point did we ask them to close the accounts of our customers. But they went ahead and shut down the accounts of every Backify customer.

For every customer's account, we have paid in advance a full year's fee. So, the step taken by LiveDrive to close our customers' accounts without refunding us is totally illegal, and we are considering our legal options at this time. Since your account was already paid fully for one year in advance, we request you to get in touch with LiveDrive and ask them to restore your service. Their customer support email address is support@livedrivesupport.com

Additionally, we understand that you may have spent considerable time/effort/bandwidth to upload your files to LiveDrive's servers and by deleting your files/data without any notice they may have violated several laws. We also advice you to get legal help in case you suffered losses due to this sudden termination of service by LiveDrive.

Oops, looks like they actually closed all accounts, including paid ones.

I hope no one actually went with them but it does to show that you can't be too careful on the internet, especially with new startups with seemingly amazing offers.