Goodbye LiveDrive, Hello BackBlaze

I cancelled my LiveDrive account today (well, tried to). In theory, they talk a good talk (unlimited storage, excellent customer support) but, in practice, the service is doesn’t match up with the bravado:

• the backup client is poor. It consistently reports that there are no files to backup even when this is plainly untrue. Telling it to scan for new files will often find - lo and behold - 9,000 new files! Not reassuring.
• response time on support tickets is slow, slow, slow. In fact, I failed to receive a response on one ticket*.
• searching for “cancel account”, “delete account”, “close account” on their support forum returns no relevant hits. You can tell if an online service is reputable or reliable if you can easily find out how to cancel your account. I should’ve checked this before signing up last year.

So, today, I raised a ticket to close my account and delete all of my data.

Funnily enough, LiveDrive responded to my close account request within minutes. Odd that.

Backblaze

I’m now backing up to BackBlaze. This US company’s client is more logical (by default it backs up everything and you tell it what to ignore) and they have a stronger reputation online. The only drawback is that they store the data in the US rather than the UK but, given that they encrypt everything I’m bothered.

productivity