LiveDrive terminates Backify contract, users don't have access to their backup | Hacker News Reader

LiveDrive terminates Backify contract, users don't have access to their backup

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83 pointssathyabhat61 comments

I 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.

On 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.

My shameless plug: http://safebox.fabulasolutions.com/ released few days ago to take care of end-to-end encryption.

> LiveDrive should have initiated a plan to get the data from the users of Backifys back to them even if Backify was being discontinued.

The problem is that all those users' backups are (probably) stored away as insurance against a possible future data-loss event. So for LiveDrive to offer a useful service to these customers they'd have to undertake to continue to provide access to the backups for some extended period of time. Without that kind of undertaking the backup data is not worth very much - the user would be running the risk that their hard drive goes pop the day after LiveDrive finally decide to end supporting the old Backify users.

Another way of looking at it: if I've just done a routine backup of my machine through Backify, downloading all that data again is probably the last thing I want to do (unless my machine just blew up). What I want is for someone to look after it until I do need it.

If you don't need a backup right away, then this loss really doesn't affect you. Just switch to a new provider and be on your way.

The people who get screwed here are people who just lost data, or who lose data before they can switch providers. All LiveDrive really needs to do is make the data available for a short time to cover those people. A month would be more than enough, and probably even just a week would do it.

Yes, yes it does affect them. Much like losing a drive in a raid5 array, the time to rebuild (re-upload a new backup) is a critical period of time where you don't have any redundancy. Any failure during this period means losing all your data.

Livedrive really threw Backify under the bus, and Backify really proved that a single level of redundancy isn't enough. Blame to go all around, although I feel bad for Backify.

I agree that it's critical, but most people won't suffer a second failure in this period. My point is simply that, while, most people won't suffer (just as most people don't need backups at any given moment, just over the long term), those few that will show what could happen to everyone else.

The point that everyone seems to be missing is that this BS also locks out all local files on every machine for people using the briefcase. I specifically kept local copies of important files on multiple machines as well as uploading to the LD servers, but as of now it is ALL inaccessible.

LD completely dropped the ball here, regardless of what Backify did or didn't do wrong.

Wow, I had no idea about that part. That goes well beyond being negligent and well into being outright evil.

Yeah... no kidding. All LD would have to do is give me a temporary account login so that the LD software would fire off and let me retrieve my local files (regardless of the online service politics going on). But they tell me that they can't and I'm screwed...even if I signed up with them directly.

And it's complete BS, since I can see the files in tact on my hard drive. The problem is that the local LD cache uses sequentially numbered folders and arbitrary file names with no extensions... so manually recovering the locally stored files would be a monumental task.

I 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.

Are you certain (and when I say "certain", I mean not just speculating about how things were set up between LiveDrive and Backify) that LiveDrive are able to tell, without a shadow of a doubt, which files belong to which Backify clients? This could be a potential legal nightmare for LiveDrive if they were to end up giving access to someone's backups to the wrong person.

"Are you certain (and when I say "certain", I mean not just speculating about how things were set up between LiveDrive and Backify) that LiveDrive are able to tell, without a shadow of a doubt, which files belong to which Backify clients?"

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242903

Fairy muff!

This looks horrendously horrible on LiveDrive. Not only for the customers of their reseller that they've screwed, but for their resellers. I would never become a LiveDrive reseller after this debacle.

This 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.

Use one of those plug computers like TonidoPlug to perform a local backup of your computers

Kind 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.

I 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 :).

Agreed, 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.

I 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).

Unlike SpiderOak, CrashPlan lets me backup data between my own machines without charging me for the storage. I wish it would do sync too...

Email 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."

This 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?

I'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

Also 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.

This 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.

how much storage do you get with an inexpensive VPS? Is that enough to backup all the data you care the most?

Only 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).

Please 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.

I'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.

Backups 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.

Before 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.

> 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.

This 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?

Even 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.

The 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.

This is why you use tarsnap. It's efficient and any trouble you can talk to Colin.

Plus, 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!

I'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.

While 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

Excuse 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

Have you tried using the --disk-pause option? That should allow you to slow Tarsnap down so that it doesn't eat all your I/Os. (For desktop systems with limited internet bandwidth, the --maxbw-rate option is probably worth investigating too, unless you want your web browsing to slow down significantly.)

The reasons I don't use tarsnap:

1. Not a big enough company. Colin might get hit by a bus.

2. Rackspace has no incoming bandwidth charges on their cloud.

You would have thought LiveDrive could have used this as a big opportunity, Backify let you down, but we are here to save the day!

Wow. 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-l...]

For 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.

How is Backblaze affording unlimited backups? It seems too good to be true.

I 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?

I'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.

"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.

My 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.

This 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.

If anybody's looking for an alternative to backupify, i run a comparison website for other services: http://skeptu.com

(feedback very welcome)

The 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.

Fixed that, thanks.

Glad it was helpful.

I guess it's Backblaze or Mozy for me then.

I recommend Backblaze, both because I use it, and because I can't even get Mozy's site to load right now.

I 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.

CrashPlan looks awesome, and they support linux. Thanks for the pointer.

full 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) . 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. 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

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