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LiveDrive terminates Backify contract, users don't have access to their backup
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wladimir 15y agoPlease note that any data you backed up using BACKIFY.COM cannot be retrieved and we recommend you establish an alternative backup service immediately. What the hell? Why not give people some time to get their data out? I know one thing for sure, I'll never store my backups with either Backify or LiveDrive.
- leftnode 15y agoI'm not sure of the technical details, but the data on LiveDrive may only be decrypted with a key that Backify has, and thus LiveDrive couldn't give you your data in a useable format. From what others have said, I'm inclined to agree with LiveDrive. We'll see what ultimately happens though.
- wheels 15y agoBackups are naturally incredibly sensitive data. It's entirely possible that even if LiveDrive can decrypt the data, that they don't have the full set of authorization tokens that Backify was using. I for one would not want all of my backups to be available just based on an email match.
- samarudge 15y agoBefore they canceled, you could go to livedrive.com, and log in with your Backify username/password, it would give you the full list of files, account settings and an option to download the software and restore files. So they did have access to the data. The software is "white-lable" by account settings, I.E. if you log into LiveDrive application with a Backify account, the branding will be Backify.
- acuozzo 15y ago> What the hell? Why not give people some time to get their data out? This is speculation on my part, but it is probably because "No contract exists between [Backify's users] and Livedrive". If Backify's relationship with Livedrive ended badly, then Livedrive has no obligation to give people time to backup their already-backed-up data. Livedrive should do the right thing, but maybe they just don't care.
- marcf 15y agoThis is a red flag on LiveDrive then. Don't use any of their white labels because if a white label ever goes down (e.g. business issues), LiveDrive immediately deletes their data. Honestly, how can LiveDrive justify such damaging actions on their part?
- bmelton 15y agoEven more interesting, to me at least, is that LiveDrive doesn't even offer themselves as an alternative. Carbonite, Mozy, etc., but not LiveDrive, where the data already sits? I suppose they either do not see themselves as a "Backup" provider or they don't want to risk being seen as trying to poach Backify's customers.
- samarudge 15y agoEmail sent out by Backify last night "First of all we would like to thank you for using Backify. We hope you really liked our service and enjoyed using it. We regret to inform you that we can not provide free backup services anymore. All free Backify accounts will be closed on November 22, 2011. In order to prevent your account from deletion, please login into [sic] your account and update your Billing Details. [HUGE GREEN "UPDATE BILLING DETAILS" BUTTON] Once again, we thank you for using Backify. Please update your billing details before November 22, 2011 to continue using the service."
- citricsquid 15y agoThis is a VERY different message. LiveDrive are saying they have terminated EVERYTHING, Backify are saying that free accounts are being terminated next week if they don't start to pay. Which is right?
- samarudge 15y agoI'm inclined to trust LiveDrive, Two reasons; 1) LiveDrive are a well respected, well known company with a good history of service and customer support. I use them as my main backup service (I never actually used Backify, just wanted to see what it was like) and trust them as such. 2) I just tried to log into my account and can't =) If LiveDrives concerns about cards have some substance last nights message might have been a last ditch attempt at getting as much information as possible
- mattmanser 15y agoAlso livedrive just exposed themselves to a colossal litigation risk there if they're not telling the truth, they didn't have to send that email.
- digitalclubb 15y agoThe following line from the email is a little but more worrying: "We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently." So Backify are asking you to join a payment plan with that huge green button and LiveDrive are saying not to give your details to them. Mixed messages are never good.
- uptown 15y agoKind of ironic that Backify's slogan is 'Data loss can happen to anyone. Even you!' If anyone is looking for an alternative, I highly recommend Crashplan. It's been my offsite solution for a while now, and I couldn't be happier.
- RyanKearney 15y ago+1 for CrashPlan, although I've recently switched to JungleDisk so I have more control over my data. Both are fantastic services.
- Confusion 15y agoI second the recommendation of Crashplan. Setting it up so my parents can remotely backup to an external drive connected to my machine (to which my own backups of course also go) was a breeze. Ironically, I regularly switch that drive with the offsite backup that I store... at my parents :).
- HyprMusic 15y agoAgreed, Crash Plan have been really good. Their client is fast, useful, and they're really cheap. Plus it can also take local backups, so there's less chance of this situation happening.
- fernandose 15y agoI recently switched to spideroak, because i didn't want to have another app perform my sync duties seperately. So not only does spideroak back-up my files to the cloud and to my NAS drive, but takes also takes care of syncing all my folders between my computers and laptop (no extra charge for additional devices, unlike other services).
- gwillen 15y agoUnlike SpiderOak, CrashPlan lets me backup data between my own machines without charging me for the storage. I wish it would do sync too...
- unkoman 15y agoI guess it's Backblaze or Mozy for me then.
- tallanvor 15y agoI recommend Backblaze, both because I use it, and because I can't even get Mozy's site to load right now.
- grimoire 15y agoI would avoid Mozy. I was using them with their unlimited plan. Less than a year ago, they dropped their unlimited plan and the new plan would have quadrupled my costs. I switched to CrashPlan and have been happy so far. With my current usage (just over 125 GB), it would cost me $11.99 per month for Mozy. I payed CrashPlan $118.99 for 4 years of unlimited usage, or less than $2.50 per month. Mozy essentially "fired" me as a customer. They stated that some customers were using too much data on their unlimited plan and introduced the new tiered price structure with the intention of pushing out the heavy users. Seems odd to me, since I only backup my music, photos, and important documents. I don't even backup my videos. It just didn't make sense for me to stay with them. The idea of charging $2/month for each 20GB above 125 seems pretty steep. And since the amount I back up will grow over time, so will my month cost.
- zargon 15y agoCrashPlan looks awesome, and they support linux. Thanks for the pointer.
- tudorw 15y agoYou would have thought LiveDrive could have used this as a big opportunity, Backify let you down, but we are here to save the day!
- marcf 15y agoI think this looks horrible on LiveDrive. LiveDrive should have initiated a plan to get the data from the users of Backifys back to them even if Backify was being discontinued. LiveDrive could have gotten massive goodwill if they did this, even if they offered to transition the data to another service. This complete loss of information is brutal and I would stay away from LiveDrive as they don't know how to properly handle important relationships. The situation should be explained in detail and an open letter by LiveDrive stating what is going wrong with Backify. This would have informed users of the situation and of Backify's actions. I believe that the data loss could have been avoided even if Backify's owners were acting fraudulently.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- marcf 15y ago"That's a legal Pandora's box in exchange for some uncertain marketing return." And this letter isn't a risk? If Backify is going to sue and LiveDrive is in the wrong, then they have enough reasons in this letter and from LiveDrive's actions already. Then open letter sharing what was going on wouldn't carry additional risks that this other letter, in fact because it would precede data loss actions or direct advice to Backify's customers to avoid credit card purchases, it would carry less risk.
- cawhitworth 15y agoOn the other hand, everyone crucified DropBox when it turned out they had the ability to arbitrarily access user data. Turns out people don't want companies to have access to their private data, right up until they do.
- SriniK 15y agoMy shameless plug: http://safebox.fabulasolutions.com/ http://safebox.fabulasolutions.com/ released few days ago to take care of end-to-end encryption.
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- jgrahamc 15y agoThis is why you use tarsnap. It's efficient and any trouble you can talk to Colin.
- Luyt 15y agoPlus, you use tarsnap in the same way as 'tar' which you're already familiar with. Backups are securely encrypted, and encryption happens on the fly. And all that goodness on the commandline!
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoI'm a happy tarsnap user, but there are real reasons not to use it: the bus factor is 1, restores of large amounts of data are slowish, and data is stored at S3-ish prices - which is to say, not cheap if you're storing terabytes of data. But tarsnap is indeed excellent.
- wheels 15y agoWhile we use tarsnap for our server backups, it's not something I'd use for frequent desktop backups. The main reason is that it doesn't have a daemon that watches file changes to keep a dirty list so it'd basically DDoS your desktop every time the cronjob ran to run the backup. Also for a desktop it's nice to have an interface where you can see the differences between backups. The I/O thing is actually a problem on servers too. See if you can spot the point in this graph where cron.daily runs: https://skitch.com/scotchi/gjbyc/generate-graph https://skitch.com/scotchi/gjbyc/generate-graph
- 286c8cb04bda 15y agoExcuse my presumption if you already know about this, but there are ways to make the I/O less aggressive for processes that hit the disk hard. Since your graph header says 'linode', I'm assuming your servers all run Linux, and you should take a look at ionice[1]. It adjusts the IO priority of a process like 'nice' adjusts CPU priority. For example, prefixing your call like this: "ionice -c 3 tarsnap...." will give tarsnap the lowest priority access to the drive. [1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice
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- forcer 15y agoI tried signing up as a reseller of LiveDrive but there is no reseller agreement on the sign up page. There is only general Terms & Conditions which apply to the end user that is signing up for backup plan from Livedrive. From their sign-up page it seems there is no contract between LiveDrive and their resellers, which would explain why LiveDrive has no obligation. Can anyone confirm the existance of reseller contract?
- dspillett 15y agoThis is why I manage my backups myself. The data I really care about (mail, documents, source code, ...) is small enough to fit a couple of full copies on an inexpensive VPS, so inexpensive that I run two so if one dies I can replace it and rebuild from the other backup (which would be much faster than pushing the data back up my ADSL line). For me to lose my important data my main machines, my local offline backup device, and two VPS providers all have to die at the same time. It isn't something I'd recommend to a non-techie though (backups are something you have to get right, and not everyone has cocked up enough to call themselves "experienced"!), it isn't free, and I don't get room to have hundreds of Gb of stuff backed up (though if I needed that, I could just rent larger VMs or even an inexpensive dedicated server), but I'm not beholden to a single company for my data's persistence.
- gabriele 15y agohow much storage do you get with an inexpensive VPS? Is that enough to backup all the data you care the most?
- dspillett 15y agoOnly 50Gb each at the moment though that is currently enough for the stuff that I really care about (but I need to think about upgrading soon): the mail and web servers that I run for me and family+friends (two weekly snapshots and two daily, managed using rsync and cp -al so it doesn't take nearly the space of four full copies), source controlled source, general documents (again using snapshots to keep multiple instances, though I'm considering moving my docs into source control for keeping a history instead), configuration files for all my servers and such, and so forth. There is a chunk of stuff that I don't backup off-site in this way but do backup offline at home (photos and MP3s for instance) and a large chunk of stuff that I don't backup at all (large media files that I could re-obtain from elsewhere as easily as I could draw back down from an offsite backup, should the RAID array fail in a way it can't survive or I cock up and accidentally delete stuff).
- bugheart 15y agofull text of e-mail Livedrive sent: ADVISORY NOTCE FROM LIVEDRIVE REGARDING BACKIFY.COM Dear Firstname lastname We are writing to you regarding BACKIFY.COM who you recently created an online backup account with. BACKIFY.COM was a reseller of Livedrive (http://www.livedrive.com http://www.livedrive.com) . Livedrive provided the technology and service behind the product offered to you by BACKIFY.COM. We are writing to inform you that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and the services that they purchased from our company on your behalf have been terminated. If you are using a service provided by BACKIFY.COM and powered by Livedrive then this service will now have stopped working. We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure. Please note that this advisory is being sent to you in good faith because we feel you should be informed that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and of the complaints we have become aware of. No contract exists between yourself and Livedrive and we are not able to assist further in any dispute you may have with BACKIFY.COM. If you have installed the online backup software provided by BACKIFY.COM we highly recommend you uninstall it from your computer by following the steps below: On Windows Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs (or ‘Programs and settings’), select Livedrive and select uninstall. On Mac Go to Finder > Applications and delete the Livedrive application. Please note that any data you backed up using BACKIFY.COM cannot be retrieved and we recommend you establish an alternative backup service immediately. Livedrive does provide a very similar online backup service to the one provided by BACKIFY.COM and you can read more details and, if you wish, signup for a trial on our website at http://www.livedrive.com http://www.livedrive.com. Please note however that we do not provide a free service as BACKIFY.COM did. Other online backup vendors you may wish to consider include: Carbonite.com iDrive.com Mozy.com We are sorry for the inconvenience this situation may have caused you. Kind Regard Livedrive Limited
- jonpaul 15y agoWow. This email lacks empathy and understanding of the situation that Backify users are now in. I'd be surprised if they converted any users over to LiveDrive. People want a company with a personal touch. Why don't most companies understand this? Also, why didn't they mention one of the most popular backup services, Dropbox? "We apologize for any inconvenience..." please rub salt in the wounds. [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-language http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-l...]
- bradleyland 15y agoFor what it's worth, an off-site backup should not be your only backup. I maintain a three stage backup strategy: * Local full backup using TimeMachine * Remote full backup using Backblaze * Working documents are in a Dropbox folder with my regular Documents folder serving as an archive As an added benefit, I share a Dropbox account with another computer on my LAN, so Dropbox syncs to it extremely quickly, even when I save large files. I feel pretty well protected with this setup, but I'm always open to scrutiny. If you see holes in my strategy, do point them out.
- marquis 15y agoHow is Backblaze affording unlimited backups? It seems too good to be true.
- 51Cards 15y agoThis is another reason I will always advocate local backups as well. Clouds may be soft and fluffy but sometimes they bite. We always think of a cloud data failure being extremely unlikely but so many other things can cause you not to be able to access your data as well.. among them corporate issues. I keep files in the cloud as an off-site backup but I also keep a couple copies of everything here locally. Not only is it quicker to access but I am always able to access it. Should a falling satellite hit my house then I still have that off-site copy. Never leave your backups in only one place or on one medium. To echo everyone else here as well, LiveDrive really missed a chance to 'step up' here.
- gravitronic 15y agoThis is one reason I use dropbox. My data is sync'd between 4 computers in different locations, as well as a copy on the dropbox servers. Even if dropbox disappeared overnight I would have my data.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoMy laptop runs duplicity once every two hours from cron which does gpg encrypted incremental backups to a network share. My HTPC does the same, but to an external hard drive plugged in via USB. Easy and quick to set up, and I don't have to rely on a third party run service.
- crdoconnor 15y agoIf anybody's looking for an alternative to backupify, i run a comparison website for other services: http://skeptu.com http://skeptu.com (feedback very welcome)
- smussman 15y agoThe prices you show go out to tiny fractions of a cent (>6 decimal places). I don't think that's going to make a difference in someone's decision, and trimming to just showing the cents will make the prices look more consistent. EDIT: I should mention that this site was useful -- I learned about backup providers that might fit me well that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.
- crdoconnor 15y agoFixed that, thanks. Glad it was helpful.
- aespinoza 15y ago"No contract exists between yourself and Livedrive and we are not able to assist further in any dispute you may have with BACKIFY.COM." This is extremely unprofessional. Just because there is no legal relationship, that doesn't mean you should just cut everybody off.
- jwblackwell 15y agoI'm using Carbonite - $59 a year for unlimited backup. Runs automatically in the background and this takes care of all my photos, videos and old documents. Then I use dropbox for my working folder, this takes care of backups a little quicker and is highly convenient.