Backify Closes Free Accounts, Starts to Charge for Storage

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• GTVic - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  Sounds like Livedrive is providing almost all of the service including processing payments if you believe the Backify email. In that case Backify is more of customer service rep than anything else.
  
  Livedrive should have given users the option to sign up with another service in order to keep their files. So in that sense I agree that their email was "cold".
  
  I signed up for a SharePoint service and they would not cancel it until I removed all of my data. That is a good way to ensure the customer doesn't lose anything.

• Visual - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link

  "unless it was making them too much loss."
  
  In that quote lies the truth, i think. http://www.livedrive.com/ForResellers
  Backify was paying a grand total of $60 per month. And they probably had thousands or tens of thousands of customers. I have no idea how that is supposed to work, but Lifedrive have still not pulled that reseller deal from their site.

• Visual - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  Even if Backify were sloppy in their customer support or had a lot of customers complain from their services and caused Lifedrive to decide to pull the plug for a valid reason, Lifedrive still should have handled this better. They shouldn't have just cancelled all end-user accounts out of the blue without warning, pissing off even those customers who were not having an issue with Backify before.
  
  But it seems much more likely to me that Lifedrive just decided to pull their own bait-and-switch trick for some reason. If you thought Backify's offering is too good to be true, how about Lifedrive's reseller program? $60 per month for unlimited number of resold accounts? Yeah, right.
  
  I'm sure they just made that offer to get some initial customers, but once the likes of backify started to bring in new accounts in massive numbers, Lifedrive changed their mind and decided this offer is not good from their point of view.
  
  The offer is still up on their site, but I doubt anyone else trying to use it will have a better result than Backify.
  
  But they do have a clause "Livedrive reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to suspend the provision of Livedrive Services to you and/or terminate your Membership at any time, without warning." in the terms of service. I guess that makes it all right, then. At least, I doubt we will see much success to any court actions against them. Which seems like a shame to me.

• GTVic - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  There should be a legal recourse. If your self-storage had a clause like that and just tossed out the contents of your locker you could sue them and win quite easily.

• DanNeely - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  IT depends on how exactly LifeDrive and Backify were integrated. If Backify was buying LD storage in bulk instead of per customer LD might not know which bits of the data belonged to whom...

• calansvc - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  I signed up for a month subscription with Backify specifically to use the briefcase for consolidating and transferring files while I build a home server. After all of this morning's BS went down, I contacted tech support at Livedrive, and still can't believe what I was told.
  
  First of all, they informed me that as soon as the Backify accounts were suspended (or deleted, whatever), all of the data tied to those accos was deleted from their servers. This means that even if Backify and Livedrive work this out, that data is lost. I find this EXTREMELY hard to believe (since anyone with any business sense at all would keep the data, to lure Backify customers to their own service, if nothing else), but the tech rep made it very clear several times that this was the case.
  
  So I asked about backups:
  
  "Well, you guys do backup the servers, right? So even if the accounts and data have been deleted, I could still retrieve my data if Livedrive and Backify work out their differences...right?"
  
  "No. Unfortunately, all data tied to Backify accounts has been irretrievably lost".
  
  Are you FREAKIN' KIDDING ME?
  
  So since I can't even access the local copies of the briefcase files due to the Livedrive software not being able to launch, I asked about that.
  
  "What about the files stored locally on my computer? I can't access those either."
  
  "Oh... those files are still there so accessing them won't be a problem. It's only the server files that have been deleted."
  
  "Ok, so how do I do that? YOUR software is preventing me from even seeing them.
  
  "Ehhh... oh yeah. Sorry, but there is nothing we can do."
  
  "So I can't bypass the are, or get a temporary account to access MY OWN FILES STORED LOCALLY ON MY OWN MACHINE?"
  
  "No. Sorry."
  
  This is unbelievable. I don't care who's at fault or what is going on at the corporate level. The fact is that Livedrive's software is preventing me from accessing local files.

• leexgx - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  i agree that LD should of not done what they did, not really used livedrive yet but the folders you have shared should still be accessible (but the briefcase mite not save them the same way folder sharing does)
  
  really if your info is that important you should sue Microsoft for terminating an service with out giving 30 day notification to its customers, they should of suspended credit cards and give the users 30 days to get there data off the cloud or at least unshared the folders and move data out of the briefcase, does not matter if they are an reseller backify
  
  have you looks for where the briefcase folder is on your pc they mite be all there unless its encrypted
  
  guess next time you not trust all your data with an online service again

• sweetspot - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  FYI,
  
  All the so called free online systems, will eventually go this way, and all your CLOUD DATA will get hijacked, its going to happen to everyone sooner or later on every scale.
  
  All ONLINE CLOUD BASED SERVICES WILL EVENTUALLY 2 THINGS HAPPEN --
  
  1. They go out of business so all your data and or games and other things are lost.
  
  2. Its no longer free and you must pay, or they hold your data hostage and you never get back your stuff unless you pay.
  
  Even the mighty STEAM games - eventually will fall prey to this concept, its inevitable.
  
  As a business model cloud computing is a terrible idea for End Users. A persons data and things they purchases are lost once the cloud business model changes at the discretion of the host, the end user has no control once some new scheme is imparted upon them.

• cditty - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  When you posted this, I knew better. If it appears too good to be true, it is.
  
  I was (and still am) for that matter that a publication with your readership would even put that garbage up, it being an unknown company and all.
  
  I think writing the article at all was a bad idea on your part.

• calansvc - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

  I don't think some people are grasping the ramifications of this.
  
  Regardless of what Backify did or didn't do, the fact is that Livedrive suspended the accounts, deleted the data, and cut off all access to local file copies (at least for Briefcase users) without any notification or regards for the users at all.
  
  This means that anyone using ANY cloud storage reseller that uses the Livedrive backend is at risk of not only loosing their online data, but locally stored data as well... at nothing more than a whim on LD's part simply because a reseller upset them somehow.