UK Cloud Storage To Debut Livedrive Backup

Is it any wonder that most storage industry professionals are predicting 2010 to be the Year of Cloud Storage?

More and more companies are coming up with — or will shortly make available — online storage services. The more established ones, such as EMC Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3, Box.net, DropBox, NovaBackup, Iron Mountain Digital, and Symantec are scooping up new users right and left.

Even newcomers like Backblaze, Egnyte and Seagate i365 reportedly are also doing well.

But there’s still a lot of room for newcomers. One of them, the UK-based Livedrive will introduce its Livedrive Backup on 1 Dec, a company source told eWEEK.

What sets Livedrive, which offers unlimited storage like all the rest, apart?

“In addition to keeping a copy of files online, users can download them at any time or view them online. Unlike other solutions, Livedrive is constantly backing up in the background — you just install it and never need to worry about it ever again. There’s nothing to configure, check, schedule, run, et cetera,” Livedrive executive Jamie Brown wrote in his blog.

Livedrive also includes a music player for users’ web portals, Brown said.

The company also has a second service, Backup & Briefcase, that combines its standard Livedrive Backup with Livedrive Briefcase, which is the company’s access-anywhere product.

“When you install Livedrive Briefcase, you get a new drive added — drive L: — where you can put files that you use regularly,” Brown said. “These files are stored on your hard drive and you can use them just like normal files, but they are also copied online so that you can access them from any web browser.”

Livedrive Backup costs $6.95 per month (£4.20). Most of the older services go for $4.95 or $5.95 per month for unlimited storage. Backup & Briefcase goes for $16.95 per month.

For more information, go here.

Chris Preimesberger

Editor of eWEEK and repository of knowledge on storage, amongst other things

View Comments

  • Livedrive seems like a great idea until you sign up and start using it. There are several issues and since I've started doing research I've found that other users are having the same issues. Check out livedriveliedtous.com to see a full list.

    The main problem I had was that when I went to upgrade from the 100GB version to the unlimited version, it kept rejecting my credit card. I tried another card as well, and nothing worked. I contacted customer service and didn't get a response for days; when I did they said to try again. It did finally tell me that it had updated, and I went along merrily uploading the rest of my files for backup purposes.

    Then I saw my bank account, and saw about 10 charges from livedrive. 8 of them were on the original card, a couple more on the second card I tried. So, I emailed them. I'm in ecommerce and I know this shouldn't be hard to fix. No response. The charges went from pending to charged, and still no word from livedrive. Then I heard back (over 2 weeks later at this poiont) that they had a problem and had requested refunds from their processor. Then several more weeks went by. I still have no resolution now and it's been about a month and a half. I've reported the charges as fraud, but I still won't get my money back until my bank does a full investigation which "may take up to 60 days" according to their literature.

    Thanks livedrive, you just totally F-ed my finances! And you won't even return my emails.

  • I think the market will be driven by Storage Service Providers offering various competing products. We have used ironbriefcase.com and they have provided services frommore than one vendor.

  • Cloud Data backup is great, it saved our company Repair plaster uk from going under when our server caught fire!

    We were lucky we had online back up with IB and managed to restore all our data.

    Thanks to Cloud storage

    So i think Cloud Storage is here to stay.

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