

Something crazy is happening at Backify. Watch out - newsit

Last night I got a cancelation notification from Backify for their free service and a few hours later this came to my email:
"Dear &#60;My Name&#62;<p>We are writing to you regarding BACKIFY.COM who you recently created an online backup account with.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>On Windows:
Go to Start &#62; Settings &#62; Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs (or ‘Programs and settings’), select Livedrive and select uninstall.<p>On Mac:
Go to Finder &#62; Applications and delete the Livedrive application.<p>Please note that any data you backed up using BACKIFY.COM cannot be retrieved and we recommend you establish an alternative backup service immediately.<p>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.<p>Other online backup vendors you may wish to consider include:
Carbonite.com
iDrive.com
Mozy.com<p>We are sorry for the inconvenience this situation may have caused you.<p>Kind Regards<p>Livedrive Limited
"
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michaelcampbell
There's a popup on backify.com now asserting some quite different details of
this story. Who's telling the truth... who knows.

"LiveDrive Account Closures

As all Backify members know now, LiveDrive has closed all the accounts. We
would like to clear the situation up with our customers.

As many of you know, you were unable to change/reset your password for the
last 10 days or so. This was due to an error in the LiveDrive API. We made
multiple contacts with LiveDrive through email and phone to get this sorted
out. Their tech support kept us saying that their "dev team" is working on it.
But the "dev team" could not sort out the issue in 10 days.

Apart from this, their payment system failed on November 8. What that means
is, we could not create any more new accounts, because their payment system
kept declining all of our credit cards. Again, we contacted LiveDrive multiple
times, but they could not sort out the issue in over 7 days.

We contacted them again yesterday and protested with strong words about the
delay in providing a solution to our problems. We asked them to either resolve
the issues, or to close our account and refund us. They responded today by
terminating our reseller account and all the accounts we have created.

As for the email they sent to our customers, we assure you that you do not
have to worry about your credit cards being used fraudulently. We did not
store your credit card numbers in our system. And about the payments that you
have already made, we will refund all of them over the next few business days.
You do not need to file any disputes or chargebacks with PayPal or your bank."

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macca321
Weirdly I went to <http://backify.com./> by accident and I got someone called
Conrad's LiveDrive page.

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samarudge
Just got this now, I only registered to test it out (and used a random
password since everyone was complaining about them storing passwords in plain
text).

Interestingly the email sent to my from Backify said the service will continue
operating till Nov 22nd.

Personally I use Backblaze for my home stuff, and LiveDrive for my work stuff
(More features like file version tracking and briefcase)

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maushu
I'm not suprised.

I wouldn't trust backify.com or livedrive.com for the reason that they sell
"unlimited space" for a flat fee. There is no such thing as unlimited.

The Backify guy(s) obviously never heard of this and tried to offer a free
service of _512 GB_. After all, LiveDrive service was for "unlimited" space.
What's a couple hundred gigabytes anyway?

~~~
asharp
There is no such thing as unlimited.

 _However_ , if you were to take p(x) as the pdf of people needing exactly X
storage and take the standard assumption that the integral over it's domain
(0->infinity) = 1, then you can work out the expected amount of storage
required per customer (integral of xp(x) over it's domain). Now as long as the
cost required to host that expected amount of storage is less then the amount
they are being paid, well then, they still make money.

But what usually happens is that they take various 'measures' to cut off the
right tail of the pdf to make it more profitable. That's dishonest.

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squealingrat
I've found that CrashPlan is the best of online backup- I can backup attached
external drives as well as my entire computer for a complete backup at a
reasonable price. I'd suggest that people also wait a bit until Black Friday,
where they sometimes discount their plans even further...

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ajbatac
Anyone help me out to get this straight? Livedrive provides very similar
online backup service to the one provided by backify, is this the main reason
why they terminated their reseller service? Or was there something else?

