LiveDrive Review
- Features
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- Likes
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- Dislikes
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- User Reviews
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- Where to Buy
Editor’s Rating:
Avg. User Rating:
| Overall |    |
| Ease of Use | |
| Features | |
| Value for Money | |
| Customer Service | |
LiveDrive Review Summary
Pros
- Livedrive web portal
- Facebook integration
- 14 day Free Trial – no credit card required
- Mobile App available for Iphone and Ipad
Cons
- Must upgrade to get multi-computer sync
- poor, unresponsive customer support
- unstable, problematic backups
- issues restoring files – files not available or corrupted
- questionable encryption & security
Bottomline
Although we appluad LiveDrive for their extensive features, we have serious questions about their backup stability, security practices, and over-all business stability. Features without underlying stability and security really don’t make for a good online storage and backup solution – therefore we feel there are better solutions available.
LiveDrive Features/Benefits
Livedrive is backed by Andrew Michael who founded Fasthosts Internet Limited, the UK’s largest and most successful Internet hosting company which he sold in 2006 for over $120 million.
| Pricing Home: | Backup: $7.95/mo or $79.95/yr (if paid annually) For 1 computer. $1.45/mo for each additional computer BriefCase: $15.95/mo or $159.95/yr (if paid annually) ProSuite: $24.95/mo or $249.95/yr (if paid annually) |
| Pricing Business: | Express: 2TB for $49.95/mo for 3 users Standard: 10TB+ for $159.95/mo for 10+users |
| Storage Space: | unlimited storage |
| Free Trial: |
Yes, Get a LiveDrive 14 Day Free Trial |
| Type of Backup: | Automatic backup – will backup any changed files that are tagged for backup. Runs in the background. |
| File Sharing: | Yes – but you have to purchase the LiveDrive Backup with Briefcase to get file sharing. |
| File Version History: | Yes – unlimited |
| Support for Mapped Drives: | Yes – LiveDrive provides full support for mapped/networked drives. |
| Support for External Drives: | Yes – LiveDrive provides support for backup of external/usb hard drives. |
| Individual File Size Limits: | none |
| How Long are Deleted Files Kept: | unlimited |
| Customer Service: | |
| Refund Policy: | full refund if canceled within 2 weeks. (however see user reviews) |
| More Info: | Make Sure to Compare Online Backup Services for Additional Plan Statistics |
Likes
Livedrive Desktop Software: Livedrive Desktop allows you to access all the files on your Livedrive directly from your computer, just like an external hard disk/USB drive. You can drag and drop files directly to your Livedrive and you can save files directly from your applications onto your Livedrive (it’s drive L:). If you have multiple computers, you can install the Livedrive Desktop Software on all your PCs and see the same files on each computer.
Personalized Web Portal: After signing up for your Livedrive account, you will be allowed to select a personal URL which gives you direct access to your Livedrive files. If you share files with others using Livedrive, they can access your shared files by going directly to your personal URL – yourname.livedrive.com. Any files that you make public will appear in the ‘Files shared with you’ tab of your personal URL. Your personal files will be password protected so only you can access them.
Drag and Drop features: Drag and drop is a theme of Livedrive’s web interface, with a Java uploader, acting as a drop-box for any files you want to quickly add to your collection.
Facebook Integration: There’s the downloadable Facebook plug-in which, once you have been granted Facebook access, you can now share your files. Simply drag and drop photos directly to and from Facebook, right from inside your Livedrive account.
Sync Files from all PC’s: This feature works with the LiveDrive Briefcase option. You will need to install the Livedrive Desktop Client software on your PC. Once this is done, any files that you add to your Livedrive on one machine will automatically be synchronized with your other PC’s. If you change a file on one PC, the newest version will appear on all your other PC’s instantaneously. This is the best way of ensuring that you always have a copy of your important files, whether you’re at home or in the office.
Edit and Create Office Documents: View and edit Microsoft Office documents from anywhere, without having to install the Office software or purchase licenses. You can do this via the web to get full power of Microsoft Office from anywhere. The web portal has integrated viewers and editors for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
Sharing of Files: You can share files via the web simply by navigating to the file or folder you wish to share on your web-portal and selecting share. You will have the option of sharing publicly (so that anyone can access your file via a web URL) or privately with a specific individual. When sharing privately you specify the e-mail address of the person you wish to share with and they will receive a private link in their e-mail to download your file. You can quickly and easily send large files to anyone without worrying about email storage or sending limits.
Libedrive FTP: You have access to all your files through the web, iphone, blackberry and other mobile. You have full access to FTP commands.
Music and Movies: The web portal has an integrated music player allowing you to enjoy your music collection on any device, anywhere. You can also place movies into your Livedrive and access it anywhere with no limit to the length of the movie.
File versioning: Livedrive keeps a history of every file on your account. You can always revert to a previous version of a document, after which any computers linked to your account will automatically synchronize the selected version of the file.
Dislikes
No Free Trial Period: Almost all of its competitors offer free services. But with Livedrive, they have a 30 day money back guarantee, enabling customers to get a full refund if the account is cancelled within the first 30 days. Livedrive cites the superior support its users will receive as one of the key reasons to pay. Update: LiveDrive now offers a 14 day Free trial with no credit card needed.
No Synchronization or "L" drive in standard Backup Package: The standard backup package does not support the "L" drive feature or any of the the synchronization functionality. You have to purchase the “Briefcase” to get this feature.
No Scheduled Backup Feature: Livedrive is not designed to run scheduled backups of system files, email and contacts. Livedrive only offers a means of securing your valuable files, accessing and sharing these files. Livedrive provides a safe and secure place to store your valuable files, but it is not a backup product in the strict sense of the word. Livedrive is currently developing a backup feature which they will be releasing soon.
Unresponsive Customer Support: With LiveDrive you only have the option of email support. We have found their support to be slow and at times completely unresponsive. Be careful.
Unstable, Problematic Backups: For a backup company this is huge! We can not understate this problem. At times it has ignored files, other files appeared corrupted, and still other files get backed up even though there have been no changes made to them.
Questionable Security: We have come to question the actual encryption practices used by LiveDrive, but when pressed for futher information on their encryption methods and details about their overall security practices LiveDrive is silent.
Where to Buy
Summary
All in all we feel that there are better solutions available. It is with regret that we come to this conclusion because we appluad LiveDrive for their features, however we question their backup stability, security practices, and over-all business stability.
For a similar service with great multi-computer syncing, file sharing, and strong security and encryption practices we recommend ZipCloud for only $4.95/month for unlimited storage. They are ranked #1 in our reviews!
Very dissapointed i really dont know what to do now every time i connect live drive to upload my files it keeps saying transfer 0 WTF!!! is up with that really pissed of us i have import data for my business dont know how to get my files back really dissapointed
live drive customer service horrible if ur plnaing for an online storage dont use them use drop box much better..
Paid for a year, really struggled to get it to work on my computer. Customer service was dire and very very slow. Same as others – auto emails and then a long wait. Gave up after three days of 24hr uploading – was snail pace despite my fast cable connection. Eventually, managed, after a recorded delivery and backup emails to get account closed and hopefully a refund. The features look good, the speed of uploading is very poor and to be viable, this company needs to invest in some sensible customer support.
terrible fucking terrible still strugling to get my files with r very important
failed to install properly, and then like others, i discovered that opening a support ticket gets no response at all….. just an auto receive message…. no attempt to discuss, sort out… nothing. waste of money
Very poor service, almost no existing customer support, we are an IT company and we have had no response to 2 tickets for over a week – probablly not suitable if one can not get support…
Only loads half of a folder and does not notify that it has failed, Fails to upload over 4000 files at a time,, they always remain to be uploaded. I have had no support from the email support service in over 4 weeks. Nice idea but very poor customer service. Not recommended.
This is a disaster. Seriously warn you against buying this.
I paid for a year for Briefcase as they give you a discount. They do a free trial but if you decide to keep and pay, it is more expensive then if you pay up front. Probably because they know most people won’t pay after the free trial.
Basically, the software doesnt work on my PC. I can’t upload using Filezilla either. I tried to install on my Mac and this didn’t work either. Furthermore, the installer fails if I try to uninstall. The only way I can upload is one by one on the website but obviously this is not practical for a lot of files.
No-one responds to emails and no-one answers the phone. I have no way to contact this company and the software doesn’t work. The website says they respond within 24 hours – this is a blatant lie – they don’t respond at all. It has been over a week now since I first contacted customer support and all I have had is an automated response.
High risk of losing your money on this. I strongly advise to stay clear.
I have been using LiveDrive since 2009. Before I signed up, I specifically asked them if after I delete the files from my local PC do they remain backed up on their server and I received a very strong “your files will always remain on our servers unless you log in and delete them”. Recently I went to retrieve some files from their server and come to find out they are not there. Some time between 2009 and 2011 they changed their method of backing up, and my files were permanently lost. They told me that in a newsletter at some point they alerted all the subscribers to the change. I decided to cancel my service and go with a Drobo system. With weekly hard copy backups, it is a very fast and efficient service.
If you are in the market for an online storage system and considering LiveDrive, please PLEASE please read the fine print and ask tons of questions before you subscribe.
with this company they answer your questions before purchase, BUT THEY LIE:( service is non existent
Although seemingly inexpensive as they allow unlimited data backup, when something goes wrong with the software (and trust me, it will), you will find tech support……less than supportive. Tickets are opened but never completed, emails go unreturned, and phone support is non-existent for those of us in the US as they are on London time. Shop around as their are many others that cost slightly more but will actually work better.
I have been a LiveDrive customer for many years. So I know LiveDrive quite well.
1.) Customer support is non existing. Please keep that in mind when dealing with LiveDrive. There won’t be anybody to help you. You won’t get more than an automatic response from their support. So support is definitely 0/5.
2.) LiveDrive is capping the upload speed to their Briefcase product. Upload is capped at around 2.2 MBit/s. I have written proof from LiveDrive were they acknowledged the upload limit. However they openly lie to their customers on their website and in the internal forum (which only LiveDrive customers can access) by stating they wouldn’t cap upload speeds.
Please decide for yourself whether you want to do business with a company that openly lies to you.
3.) They have technical issues. I lost data because LiveDrive’s servers wouldn’t let me download some of my uploaded data. LiveDrive was not able to resolve those issues. There are other customers who experienced similar issues.
Keep in mind that LiveDrive already has lost customer data in the past.
4.) Security issues: Your data on their servers is encrypted. However the only one who has the key is LiveDrive itself.
5.) Their Backup product is not able to do block level incremental backups. What does this mean? Almost all of LiveDrive’s competitors will upload only the changed portion of a file after it’s initial upload. If you have a 1 GB Outlook file and you receive an email, only a few Kilobytes will be uploaded. In the case of LiveDrive the complete file (1 GB) will be completely uploaded again and again and again – every time you get a new email.
If you’re dealing with larger files LiveDrive’s Backup is almost useless.
5.) Finally: The price is more or less unbeatable. You get a technically outdated (Backup) and unreliable product with no customer service. But if you’re only interested in size – the amount of data you can store online – LiveDrive is a bargain.
Having had LiveDrive in Pro account form for over 8 months the experience has been truely terriible. Files not getting backed up, file you think are getting backed up but are 0 bytes in size on their servers, their app getting stuck and never backing stuff up, the list goes on and on. if I hadn’t kept a sharp eye on it and just assumed it did what it said, it would be a very nasty surprise the day data had to be restored.
Tech support is terrible, a very questionable company to deal with, terrible product considering backup has to rock solid in stability.
Don’t be tempted – buy a NAS or the like and just backup to that!
My entire experience was a disaster. Everything was fine until I actually needed to recover some files. Then I found out that some fines hadn’t actually been backed up and of the ones that had been backed up, their lousy restore solution was unable to bring them back. Basically, any large gets zipped up on their server before transfer down to you, and that seems to corrup most of their files. They will blame it on your home network, but I’ve tried it on a corporate network and it doesn’t work there either.
Non existent customer support. Their website states 24-hr response, but they’ll get back to you days or weeks after, if you’re lucky enough to get a response at all.
As bad as that is, it’s not their biggest flaw by far. Their software is buggy and can damage your files.
I personally lost thousands of irreplaceable files cause of this major bug. Made several attempts to contact them to resolve it but not a single response.
They even shutdown their Facebook page after several complaints were posted there that they could nor would respond to.
Use with EXTREME CAUTION.
I was using Livedrive on one pc for 18 months with the odd minor problem that I could sort myself, until I had the main Excel database I was using start duplicating itself when I was using it then refusing to save the duplicate. As I mainly used Excel it caused no end of problems.
Raising the issue on the technical support forum was consistently ignored. I then emailed the support email and got a reply within 3 days and a remote access session the following day, although they were 30 minutes late to start.
This did not solve my problem and they made changes to my system (making visible the system files) which they did not change back when the remote support session finished so I had to work out how to do it myself.
I sent another email to support. They replied asking when I would like to book another session (you have to give 24 hours notice) so I booked it for the following day.
Their support team missed the appointment, didn’t contact me to rebook or apologise then proceeded to ignore the support ticket for 12 weeks and ignore my further requests for assistance in the support forums.
During this period my upload speeds on a 50mbps connection ground to a halt so that backing up my files, where I specified unlimited bandwidth, were uploading at between 0-5k a second. Uploading a one gig file became impossible with only 36 meg uploaded in 10 hours. I swapped to the free version of Dropbox and had uploaded all files including backup (2 gig) in under 2 hours.
After 12 weeks of being completely ignored (I had already started using Dropbox for free by this point) I sent an email to the cancellation email asking for my service to be cancelled, 6 months before my subscription was due to expire, because of horrendous customer support.
I also tried to remove my credit card details from their system so that I could run out the remaining 6 months of the subscription without fear that they would automatically take payment for a further year. That’s not possible so I had to cancel my account early.
My issue was total lack of customer support but when I sent an email requesting cancellation of the service I got a response from a person within 24 hours and my data was deleted in the same period.
I sent a reply saying it was ridiculous that for account cancellations where they were losing business they were 100% on the ball but for retaining customers they were non existent. That email was ignored!
Overall I generally had a good service I thought until I got a problem at which point the backup system failed to do as advertised i.e. back up my data and with no customer support to actually resolve the problem it became a completely unnecessary product that was just costing me money to store stuff on my own hard-drive!
Livedrive has a horrifically inelegant interface, missing features, and a dreadfully slow upload speed for large file quantities. Pause your upload to backup, come back later, press reactivate, and all the files say “requeued”. Huh? They’re still in requeued as I write this, and they’re staying that way. Requeued? Requeued where? When will you start to upload my remaining files again? How can I select an option to have the files continue uploading without having to re-upload all the files that were already successfully uploaded? Uh, no idea . Blechh..
Guys, you gotta take this thing through a usability lab. Pronto.
Livedrive is just not ready for prime time, it is very easy to set up. It was very cheap, I got $150 for 5 years for unlimited . What went wrong? well I also have Mozy and I am one of the customers that was in the initial drop of Mozy , they annoyed me enough with their price change to try something else. I managed to upload 4GB to livedrive before I cancelled. It took about a week or more. I got anywhere from 4Kb/s to 400Kb/s upload having it set to use anything and everything I have as far as bandwidth. I just gave Mozy the same task and it is running right now at 4Mb/s upload, I expect it to finish uploading 40Gb in a day or so. I just could not take the upload speed of livedrive. I hope they get it fixed in the end. I cancelled my livedrive within the 30 days and will get my money back.
On the surface, LiveDrive seems to be the perfect online backup system, promising unlimted storage and the ability to stream to a movile device. But below the veneer is a service that, while full of potential, fails to deliver practical usability and will end up costing you way more than you anticipated.
- Desktop monitoring is unpredictable and can’t be trusted to backup/exclude the files you want. Random folders will get added to the backup list, and possibly removed as well
- Mobile app is a great idea, but not actually worth using
- Customer support is very poor, and next to nonexistant. Reports to them of consistent errors fail to even get a response.
In the end, I wish I had not purchased their service.
Bad!
Low upload speed to LiveDrive with my 1 gbps broadband.
Bad custumer support.
I give a note of 1/10
Being a Livedrive customer for more than a year now, I feel urged to address some serious issues. Although Livedrive is a feature-rich and easy-to-use storage solution, the reliability of this back-up method however is poor. After having a harddrive crash, I synced a new harddrive with the online content of my livedrive. Unfortunately, a reasonable amount of files are missing; i.e. they are “ghost” files online having only a name and no content. Customer support is poor: they use standard answers in their first e-mail and don’t even reply to subsequent questions.
In short, although it seems appealing to use Livedrive because of the features and pricing, the poor reliability makes it an unwise choice. There are better alternatives out there!
One more thing!
When using FileZilla FTP goto Edit->Settings dialog box and in the “File Exists Action” select “Overwrite file if size differs or source is newer”..
This will ensure that if the connection drops out between you and livedrive ftp service when it connects back up it doesnt ask continually ask you for confirmation via dialog box
Okay, so ive just signed up to LiveDrive this week (31/10/2010) even aftger reading all the negative reviews out there and there are loads! My reason? I want to be able to store my media & music from several USB drives (that are not always connected to my PC and *archive* them in the sky. The other services lke Mozy etc do not allow you to do this. When you remove the drive the files in the sky are removed and held for 30 days in the recycle bin.
Using LiveDrive and thier “Briefcase” gives me this functionality..
However…… After using thier software for a few days ive decided to uninstall it and use open source FileZilla FTP program to upload all my content to thier servers and then use NetDriive to display the ftp drive as a drive in my computer which works better than the LiveDrive software as you have complete control over whats in the queue to be uploaded/downloaded and you dont need to worry about the stupid cache diirectory.
The only other service that kinda comes close to LiveDrive for this kinda service is SugarSync as you can store files in the WebArchive folder but there is no FTP access and the prices are staggering. 9.99 per month for only 60 gig!!! LiveSync iis unlimited!!!!
Im going to run with the service for a while and see how it fairs
which service have you gone for?
I recommended livedrive to my employer to user as our backup solution. I really wanted something that would sync multiple computers together (laptops) and included revisioning and livedrive seemed perfect.
After paying for the pro version about 10 days into our using livedrive it became apparent I had made a terrible mistake. All of the posts on here about the general lack of stability was absolutely true in my experience. We have lost a couple of files that turns into “0 Bytes” files that without a doubt was caused by livedrive. As soon as I became aware of it I remove livedrive and am now looking for another service.
Currently I’m trying out sugar sync. We’ll see how that goes.
Like others have said, I wish their service worked, but it just doesn’t. Kind of like dropbox except opposite: “It just doesn’t work.”
I signed up as a reseller and paid for private branding, sent mulitple emails to support, sales and tried to post to forum after a full week NO RESPONSE from anyone, could not belive the poor customer service. I really like the concept and the software had a few glitches from what I saw but the customer service is what broke me.
Obviously they have more customers and resellers than they need.
TOO BAD! Thought this would be a great solution add on for my business to offer.
“If you are considering trying Livedrive, please BEWARE! Do yourself a favor and find a different service. There are other companies that will stand by their product, and help you get it working properly. Even once we determined that the livedrive product was COMPLETELY USELESS to our company, livedrive would not even refund the prorata portion of the amount we paid. Can you spell SCAM! There is nothing more to say… find another company – but don’t even think about using Livedrive.”
Poor customer service. Poor software. Would not issue refund after reporting software was faulty and charged my credit card again without warning. Don’t purchase anything from this company. Use Carbonite instead.
After two years, I decided to cancel LiveDrive and go with another company. I search the Live Drive website and found out the steps that they require for cancellation purposes. I followed their instructions exactly. I received a cancellation notice from them.
But something told me that the foregoing wouldn’t be enough. So, I called me bank and had them cancel my credit card and send me a new one (with a new number code). Sure enough, I later received an email from LiveDrive saying that they could not renew my subscription because my credit card would no longer work.
Very nice Mark. You did the right thing.
Your comparison table does not include all of the features that may be important to many people. Most of the services are per computer and require the files you back up to exist on your computer all (or most) of the time or they will disappear from your online backup. Livedrive allows you to backup any files you want from any of your computers and use them on any of your computers. Before you decide on an online service, determine what you really want (how many computers, how much disk space will you need, how do you want to access it) and then research what will satisfy your requirements at the least cost.
If I am on vacation using my notebook computer and want some files from livedrive, I only need an internet connection and I can retrive them.
I transfer with FTP. Of course I would prefer that be sFTP, which at this time is not supported. I don’t use the backup feature. I probably would if it I could schedule when I want them to happen. I’ve found the upload speed using FTP to be in line with other upload situations I have encountered and much faster than some of the services I evaluated.
It remains to be seen if they are really able to do what they say they can, but an online backup will not ever be my only backup anyway.
Now I have a pretty good insite into this particular company. Why? Because I happened to get a tour of their offices in Paddington, London before they went live, to talk to them about technical stuff.
They were reluctant to pay data centre costs, bandwidth costs, server costs, etc. The software was incredibly flaky, although I was sure it would get better. The beta service ran..wait for it…on 2 HP servers in a small rack in the office. No joke!
They had no backup strategy and didn’t seem to worry too much about it. The head guy (who started Fasthosts and then sold it for lots of cash) was p’d off because he’d already spend 1.4m on the venture and it wasn’t live. He really didn’t want to pay for anything he thought was unnecessary.
I’ve seen mention issues of corrupted files and data. This is something I pointed out would happen, as their backend software has difficulty in assigning storage properly through their very poorly implemented database.
Encryption? Not a hope! Their servers weren’t (aren’t?) powerful enough to deal with it, so it didn’t (doesn’t?) happen. They had not even worked out how to separate peoples accounts securely. I’m pretty sure that given a few hours and an account I could hack between peoples accounts and get some juicy data from them. I’m just not prepared to pay for the account to do it!
This guy started Fasthosts with a PC under his desk in his bed, and I’m telling you, that when I met him, he still thought he could run a business like online storage that way. When asked about people relying on his service as a safe storage, he pretty much said it was their own fault if they lost data. Nice attitude to the people who pay his company!
I walked away from them back then, as I really didn’t want my (reasonably good) reputation to be damaged by being linked to them. Looks like I made they right choice!
Just have a look at the homepage of the portal. There you find the most recently uploaded and updated files. This list absolutely makes no sense. It only shows old files or files that even aren”t in the backup folders.
I also made some changes to my local files 48 hours ago. I’m still waiting for the changes to be uploaded. I’m talking about the Backup functionality, not the briefcase. But the behaviour of the briefcase on the other hand is also unpredictable.
I send some emails, but I got no repsonse. I phoned to them, but I got a woman on the line with a child screaming on the background. She couldn’t find the number of the PR manager, but will ask him to call me back. That will probably never happen.
DON’T USE livedrive
Erik has made a fundamental flaw in making his assessment of Livedrive when he states: “…and have been testing all the majors over the past week”. You can’t make a genuine assessment of Livedrive’s service in 1 week, let alone within their 30 day trial period. Slowly but surely, severe flaws start to become apparent. As each build of the client would come out once a month (if we were lucky), it would take 2 steps forward and then 3 back. The basic functionality of being able to reliably backup my library became worse and worse. Checksum errors, file corruption, uploads that take forever, files that upload over and over again, I could go on and on. Once you run their client for a while and start looking behind the fancy interface to verify whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, you fnd out that you’ve been ripped off. After 6-1/2 months of pure frustration, I finally got a refund. Your mileage may vary.
Erik,
IN response to your comment, I was a livedrive user since april 27th. I signed up with a wrong subscription and ended up canceling my service.. it took me more than 1 week to get my info fixed!! I had to call the PR man, dominic cross to get everything fixed!! Livedrive had no other point of contact!!! That was the beginning of my pains.
I signed on to the forums immediately because i like what i read about this company! I started communicating bugs… and networking with other users of the service. After a few months… people started to talk bad about livedrive… I noticed that livedrive was very selective in questions they wanted to answer, but… in my opinion i thought everything was fine.. i was promoted as a moderator.. and continued to support them. But.. after several attempts to get my own problems fixed in addition to seeing livedrives silence to issues that others kept brining up… i had to bail ship. all we asked for was answers… Livedrive public forums became a place of advertisement for many services such as mozy, carbonite, and others, in addition, people started demanding refunds based posted proof of non encryption which went unanswered on the forums since May. But there were many other questions that went unanswered to!! When you charge $150 for one year… you should have stability!! I never had corruption with IBackup, or MOzy… in fact… Livedrive messes with your local copy of information so not only does the cloud get corrupt data.. it sync it back down to your local copy. im sorry livedrive!! I really wish things could have been better for all of us!! I wish you best of luck!!
Erik, for many people money is a limited resource
…. For me.. I spend $150 for one y ear on Livedrive… I spend $55 a year for IBackup, when livedrive backups… corrupts local data.. then Ibackup backups that corrupt data .. what is the point? No we just waste money.
I have been extensively searching for a continuous backup solution for my clients, and have been testing all the majors over the past week… Mozy, Carbonite, Idrive, Memopal, and finally Livedrive (also a few others not worth mentioning). I have also seen the negative comments by the livedriveliedtous peeps. Despite those claims, (valid as they might be for their particular situations and opinions), I have found Livedrive to be quite extraordinary. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, and can’t be approached as a backup solution (albeit does achieve keeping your files “in the cloud”)… in truth, it is so much more than backup OR online storage. It really is the next step in the evolution of cloud computing. I think it is important to acknowledge that Livedrive is in it’s infancy (not even a year out of beta), and as such will go through some growing pains. Anyone would be foolish to put their eggs all in one basket when it comes to priceless family photos and such… and if you got burned over the last 10 months, then shame on you for not implementing a secondary backup. In today’s age of $5 monthly backups from plenty of providers… it behooves us all to be using more than one. As for Livedrive… I’m impressed, and will keep an eye out to see how they continue to improve what they created.
DONT USE LIVEDRIVE. Why?
1. No Support Response
2. Files get corrupted
3. Files get lost
4. Desktop Client is unusuable on slower pcs (ie. netbooks)
5. Livedrive does not guarantee for the files. if your files get lost due to hardware issue at livedrive.com they are gone forever.
6. Livedrive lies on their customers (ie. they sayy they use encryption, actually the DO NOT)
7Livedrive staff can look at your data.
8. Livedrive can ban you any time and wihout prior warning and without violationg the ToS
9. FTP does not work consistently
and so on and so on…
Have a look at their forums at http://support.livedrive.com/forums therer you will see the truth.
DO NOT SE LIVEDRIVE.
I really like Livedrive because it becomes part of my Explorer feature of XP. I am disappointed in the use of its WebPortal for uploading files and folders. It will not work for me. However, the Desktop software makes the whole service work well for me. Other than the Webportal, I like Livedrive