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Comment by marcf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

> 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.

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.

Deleted comment

"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.

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