Advisory Notice from Livedrive Regarding Backify.com

Got an interesting email this morning from Livedrive regarding one of their now former resellers, Backify. Backify made a splash roughly a month ago when they opened the doors and offered users 512GB of space for free. They promptly ended that promotion stating in another press release that they had 50,000 users signup. At that time it looked like all the free users would keep their free space, but that appears to no longer be true.

 

According to the email from Livedrive, Backify is no longer a reseller of the Livedrive service. If you do visit the Backify website today and click “Sign Up” you will be presented with a lightbox window telling you that “New accounts are temporarily unavailable.” Not sure how they are going to start creating accounts again in a few hours since they no longer have a service to sell, but that is what happens when someone tries to sign up.

Hopefully you were not relying on Backify for your main backup. I highly encourage you to try one of our top ten services. They are companies that we feel can be trusted to keep your data safe.

Here are some links to our top ten services as off October 2011. If you want unlimited space for your backup take a look at one of our top three.

  1. Backblaze – Read our review
  2. CrashPlan – Read our review
  3. Carbonite – Read our review
  4. SpiderOak – Read our review
  5. IDrive – Read our review
  6. SugarSync – Read our review
  7. SOS Online BackupRead our review
  8. Mozy – Read our review
  9. Keepit – Read our review
  10. Memopal – Read our review

Below is the email I received from Livedrive.

ADVISORY NOTICE FROM LIVEDRIVE REGARDING BACKIFY.com

Dear John
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
IDrive
Mozy

We are sorry for the inconvenience this situation may have caused you.

Kind Regards

Livedrive Limited


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13 responses to “Advisory Notice from Livedrive Regarding Backify.com”

  1. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    backzup founder indirectly spoken yesterday on a PR about backify…

    1. John Tucker Avatar

      I believe you are talking about the latest Backzup press release. I saw it yesterday and since you mentioned it I have posted it.

      This does make it appear that Backzup and Backify have nothing in common except being a Livedrive reseller and a similar idea to offer 512GB free accounts. Not so sure I would trust them.

  2. k'ajl lu Avatar

    i’m sure it’s true that i could be wrong – my comment concerning Backify having possibly just morphed into Backzup was based on what i noticed in my PayPal payment history.

    Specifically, over the course of the dispute involving my payment to Backify (which thankfully i have since won and finally received my money back! yay), i noticed that the way their business name and contact info appeared within my PayPal history changed, from Backify‘s old info into this:


    Business Name: Backzup Service Ltd.
    Customer Service URL: http://www.Backify.com

    :)

    1. John Tucker Avatar

      Thanks for that information. I apologize about editing your comment. For those wondering I removed the email addresses and phone number in the comment so spam bots would not scrape that information.

      Does anyone else have more information on this? I am wrapped up in other work and will not have a chance to look into this more for a little while.

  3. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    the last ******* of ex-backify team ?

    Dear Sebastien WILLEMIJNS,

    We are writing to you in regards to the recent action taken by LiveDrive to close your backup/briefcase account.

    Backify used to be a reseller for LiveDrive.com’s services. Recently we were having some issues with their serive and they were literally unable to provide a solution to our problems. More information about these issues can be read on our homepage at http://www.backify.com. Tired of the service provided by LiveDrive, we asked them to close our reseller account. It may be noted that at no point did we ask them to close the accounts of our customers. But they went ahead and shut down the accounts of every Backify customer.

    For every customer’s account, we have paid in advance a full year’s fee. So, the step taken by LiveDrive to close our customers’ accounts without refunding us is totally illegal, and we are considering our legal options at this time. Since your account was already paid fully for one year in advance, we request you to get in touch with LiveDrive and ask them to restore your service. Their customer support email address is [email protected]

    Additionally, we understand that you may have spent considerable time/effort/bandwidth to upload your files to LiveDrive’s servers and by deleting your files/data without any notice they may have violated several laws. We also advice you to get legal help in case you suffered losses due to this sudden termination of service by LiveDrive.

    Thanks,
    Backify Team

  4. Bart Roelant Avatar
    Bart Roelant

    I just want to make some comments here.

    What Backify tried to do is just fraud. They offered free accounts, then after 5 days stopped with it and then on Nov 16th they emailed this to their customers:

    ”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 your account and update your Billing Details.
    Update Billing Details
    Once again, we thank you for using Backify. Please update your billing details before November 22, 2011 to continue using the service.”

    To me that is cheating on your customers and I believe it triggered a lot of complaints towards livedrive. LiveDrive then responded by closing the reseller account (rightfully so !)

    We at BeeCloud.eu will keep on serving free accounts and we will keep on supporting all our users. We still believe that the product that LiveDrive offers is a great product and we will keep on promoting it.
    The whole Backify story shows that in an online world nobody is to be trusted and it this will have an impact on a lot of the other (livedrive) resellers.

    We can only try to gain the trust again of a lot of our customers by staying focused and by continueing to offer great support.

    Regards,
    BeeCloud.eu

  5. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    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.

    they are really something some strange behaviour with backify and livedrive

    now livedrive says “check your bank account” only now (lol), they purpose their own competitor on the email (near of a stupid behaviour i still laugh again about this big bullshit)

    backify tried to badly and laterly monetize free account by a forcing method and does not warn customers they can have some troubles to pay…

    It seems the amount of data of these 50.000 free accounts was not pleasing to livedrive… and no comment has been done about payement on beecloud.eu forums (his owner seems to be dead as ther backify owner excepting today for rhe last owner guy i spoke ^^)

    1. k'ajl lu Avatar
      k’ajl lu

      …(in response just to this particular piece of the load of backify crap:)…

      …”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. lies.

      hmph. indeed. I was one of the prize idiots who actually paid money for backify’s extra “briefcase” service… not only have I still not received ANY of my money back, I’ve never even received a confirmation email. not one response to my numerous customer support requests … ironically, I have had to file a dispute via PayPal. it’s still pending, of course…

      …btw, (just FYI for any of my fellow chumps who are now owed $)… based on the info they’re supplying to PayPal -because unlike customers, they can’t ignore PayPal- backify.com hasn’t truly gone away – they’re now just calling themselves backzup.com

      p.s. I now use the above mentioned http://www.beecloud.eu (free) ~ they’ve been perfect so far…

      1. John Tucker Avatar

        I am not so sure that Backify is now calling itself Backzup. While it could be possible and Backzup is certainly a Livedrive reseller, their is not a lot of public information putting the two together.

        Sorry you got burned but Backify.

  6. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    Their facebook account are closed now…

    1. John Tucker Avatar

      Looks like they have updated their website. I would guess they are done for now.

  7. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    Hey john,

    beecloud.eu is still alive ;) http://www.beecloud.eu/freebackup.html
    when it will be dead ? shortly ? ^^

    In all cases, the broken contract is not so fair for paid ppl…

    So funny they speak about their competitors…………………………

    1. John Tucker Avatar

      Good question. There must be something else besides just the free accounts that got them into trouble to make Livedrive feel they had to go to these steps.

      Wait and see I guess.

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