LiveDrive came out with a different perspective for storing your files online securely. The name might look a little like Windows Live Skydrive which offers 25GB. But LiveDrive, as it’s name remarks itself, provides unlimited space online for storing all your documents, photos, music, videos and any other files in a simple and user friendly interface. The concept of LiveDrive is not to store your data at your computer but store it online for larger aperture of accessibility. I’ve seen a number of file storage systems such as in.solit.us, Mozy.com, Box.net, ElephantDrive. They all come with storage but they don’t provide the full concept of online file storage. Lets take a deep look inside.
Features:
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Explorer like user interface
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Built in Web Applications for editing your photos and documents
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Unlimited storage space
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Strong security
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Synchronization through multiple PCs
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Send large files to anyone privately
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Publish files to Facebook and Youtube (Others planned)
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Mobile and iPhone accessibility
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Access your files offline
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Sync with your iTunes music library
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The LiveDrive desktop application acts as a regular hard drive
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Access your files from anywhere
The LiveDrive Screen Cast:
The File manager interface
File manager actions
File view and file actions
File sharing options
Automatic file revisions
Web applications for editing your documents and photos
Multiple sequential uploads
FotoFlexer web application for editing photos
Edit documents with Zoho Writer
Send any file via e-mail easily
Expectations:
- Interface improvements
- Speed improvement
- More publishing features
- More web application integration
- Social networking options
- Simpler and less error free sign-up (It took me a while to fill up everything)
- Hot linking public files
- Support for MAC and Linux systems
Conclusion:
These are only the web based features of the LiveDrive. There are much more options available with the Windows Vista/XP bases desktop application. I like the concept of the application. There are few other web applications like in.solit.us (yes i wrote about it here) but they don’t really have the potential like the LiveDrive. We would like to see more feature in the future. But you can always sign-up (currently free unlimited) and share your own thoughts and experience about the LiveDrive.
More on LiveDrive:
- Livedrive provides unlimited online storage [DownloadSquad]
- LiveDrive offers unlimited storage [LifeHacker]
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Have you Subscribed yet?:
It sounds like LiveDrive may make some waves in the space – though as you point out, it has a ways to go before it catches up with Mozy, Box, or ElephantDrive.
We’ll be adding LiveDrive shortly to our review site, but if you are interested in learning more, check out http://cloudstorage.wordpress.com.
Colt
6 Jan 09 at 3:29 am
If you want to tranfer large files seamlessly Otengo. I have used it to send picture albums, home videos, presentations etc. Very fast, secure and emial like transfer. No hassle of ftp or painful uploading and downloading involved. Greatest thing is you can send entire folders. No need to attach each file one by one as in normal email applications. Available at http://www.otengo.com.
Tinstin
7 Jan 09 at 6:20 am
[...] by Ruhani Rabin on February 13, 2009. Sponsored Links Previously mentioned free and unlimited online file storage provider Livedrive just got updated. Livedrive provides you unlimited storage with a desktop application enables you [...]
Livedrive updated - added 64 bit support and speed enhancement
13 Feb 09 at 10:51 pm
As a LiveDrive user, I am rather amazed at some of the negative comments here. I’ve been checking out Online Storage sites now for some time. The differences are vast. Service satisfaction in an online storage solution have more to do with personal needs and features offered.
“Mozy, Box, & ElephantDrive” feature sets are quite dismal for the price paid in comparison to LiveDrive . When you compaire apples to apples, the only service that’s fair to compare with – feature set-wise – is FilesAnywhere, and their prices are just plain outrageous.
The features I needed were Online Storage, FTP access, Public & Private Sharing, Transfer Security, a nice Web interface with online features such as direct audio & video file playing, and finally, a decent mobile site or application. None of the other sites mentioned here come close.
LiveDrive excels in all of these areas. Their site and software is solid & reliable and their support is awesome. I get answers to support issues within 24 hours. I’m still wating for support replies from many of the other services I’ve tried.
Is LiveDrive perfect? No, the local LiveDrive cache eats up drive space. It maintains a separate cache/copy of every file you upload. So if you were to backup your entire computer, you would need an equivalent amount of drive space to store the cache. Also, their FTP service only has a date timestamp (all file timestamps show 12:00am) which they were aware of and intend to address once other priorities are addressed.
No, I’m not an employee of LiveDrive. Just a happy customer who has FINALLY found a service that meets my needs for an affordable price.
BLatSD
29 Mar 09 at 3:29 am
I tried Mozy and I like LiveDrive better. Mainly because I can use it as a remote backup. So, if I am out of the office I can access files to send to clients. I really do think this is the way to go. Mozy just didn’t have the features that LiveDrive has. Not to mention the 10 computers backed up for $130 per year. Great! Go LiveDrive!
Matt Parker
30 Mar 09 at 11:12 am
BLatSD Wrote:
Is LiveDrive perfect? No, the local LiveDrive cache eats up drive space. It maintains a separate cache/copy of every file you upload.
Any chance you can tell me the path to this cache? Because Livedrive can’t, and the uninstaller hasn’t deleted it.
Ben Lovejoy
29 Apr 09 at 8:24 pm
After reading the reviews and trying many of those companies reviewed @ http://online-storage-service-review.toptenreviews.com/ we were surprised that LiveDrive was not in the ranks at all, as it surpasses ALL of those reviewed in every area.
It handles the speed issue with the cache (which can be activated only on certain files and folders by the way for those of you who complained about it eating up hard drive space. So the cache size is essentially controllable, even if you cannot easily find it (which in my opinion is a good thing, but it would be nice to be able to relocate it to another local partition or even a local area network drive space)).
It handles the interface issue by making it a seamless integration into the o/s, providing simple drive letter access.
You can access files from anywhere there is an internet connection, it offers public and private file sharing capabilities, and it is secure. All they need next is an integrated collaboration service and the competition will suffer.
It functions as your backup, provides access to files from any internet interface including mobile devices, as well as provides ways to edit many types of files without even having to have the software loaded.
It out prices all of the competition as well by offering unlimited storage for a little over 10$ monthly. (This was our only concern; can they sustain that low of a price offering and remain in business, while housing all that data for people? Sometimes too cheap is not good either.) We figure it is likely they will sell, and the service will be ruined by a big guy purchaser as is nearly everything else ultimately.
It did by the way require 24-48 hours to load it up, but then again we did put almost a tera-byte of data up there. (We just did a copy to the L: Drive and came back a couple days later, and it was done and synced. Then we eliminated our local copies, by right-clicking the folders not needed locally, and regained our local hard drive space.)
Our only complaint is that their website is boring.
And, for peace of mind sake, we’d like to know more about the company.
Know more about the physical location and quality of the data center where our files are being stored… Know more about how the company operates and maintains its disaster recovery strategies and the like…
Perhaps photos and live video feeds into the data center would be nice.
That said, for now, you just cannot go wrong with this service. The competition should take heed.
Basil Babaa
5 Jun 09 at 6:42 pm
It is funny that this is "comment" is on almost every review of livedrive on the web. FAKE by employer.
The truth is you pay a premium price for a product that is still in ALPHA not even BETA. Downtime is as often as uptime. There is no privacy, they look through your files. For a better understanding of the service or lack there of please see support.livedrive.com/forums
there you will see the daily problems going on with the service
livedrive_tony
12 Jul 09 at 11:03 pm
Unfortunately the service suffers from long outtages. FTP rarely works. Client doesn't work with MAC and some other OS. Many clitches still in place. like stated above read for yourself on their support forums.
support.livedrive.com/forums
Def one of the worst storage solutions our company has tried.
Dave
12 Jul 09 at 11:05 pm
DONT USE LIVEDRIVE. Why?
1. No Support Response
2. Files get corrupted
3. Files get lost
4. Desktop Client is unusuable on slower pcs (ie. netbooks)
5. Livedrive does not guarantee for the files. if your files get lost due to hardware issue at livedrive.com they are gone forever.
6. Livedrive lies on their customers (ie. they sayy they use encryption, actually the DO NOT)
7Livedrive staff can look at your data.
8. Livedrive can ban you any time and wihout prior warning and without violationg the ToS
9. FTP does not work consistently
and so on and so on…
Have a look at their forums at http://support.livedrive.com/forums therer you will see the truth.
DO NOT SE LIVEDRIVE. THEI ARE SCAMMERS.
brethil
19 Jul 09 at 12:40 pm
Hi all!
The ease way to create and store you data is http://mytaskhelper.com – a free online database application, that creates the most unbelievable web forms, add input boxes, text areas, lists, drop-down boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, Files/Video/Images and more.
It has many improvements and enhancements.
Now it acts mostly like Web-Forms builder.
It has Team page now, so you can work with team on your databases,
web-froms.
You can create forms with fields and integrate it into you website.It makes ease and quickly.
It is unessential to know php,sql,asp…etc.
Hope it will help to everyone
Thanks
iceman
20 Jul 09 at 8:09 am
i was looking for data back up online, but is livedrive going to last long time?
kur
1 Sep 09 at 10:46 pm
donde descargo el livedrive para windows vista premium de 64 bits
fernando garzon
11 Oct 09 at 4:02 am
I dont know about you guys.. but livedrive has some serious flaws.. there PR team is quick to conceal any problems with the service… but starting October 1st all these flaws have been recorded and documented… We want the public to know all the truths.. not just what they think you should know……
visit us here: http://www.LivedriveLiedToUs.com
Support
31 Oct 09 at 1:29 am
check out livedriveliedtous.com you can see the truth!
Bob
3 Nov 09 at 9:25 pm
I am having the same issue. I have been locked out of my own information when I need it the most and no one from customer service will respond.
writer
24 Nov 09 at 12:40 am
I advise you all to wait until Livedrive comes out of the beta stage. It is barely in the alpha stage yet. Very, very buggy.
Scott S.
13 Dec 09 at 2:34 am
Just have a look at the homepage of the portal. There you find the most recently uploaded and updated files. This list absolutely makes no sense. It only shows old files or files that even aren''t in the backup folders.
I also made some changes to my local files 48 hours ago. I'm still waiting for the changes to be uploaded. I'm talking about the Backup functionality, not the briefcase. But the behaviour of the briefcase on the other hand is also unpredictable.
I send some emails, but I got no repsonse. I phoned to them, but I got a woman on the line with a child screaming on the background. She couldn't find the number of the PR manager, but will ask him to call me back. That will probably never happen.
DON'T USE livedrive
W Kruisen
29 Dec 09 at 8:00 pm
I've been using livedrive for the past two months and I only use their ftp service. For the yearly price of around $120/year you can't beat their unlimited storage, unlimited simultaneous ftp logins and bandwidth. The latter two are very important for someone like myself who is using a fiber optic line from Japan. I tried Mozy, Elephant Drive but the main problem is the single connection speed is slow from Japan, around 50KB/s. With livedrive FTP service my upload speed is around 150KB/s, but I can have say 50 FTP connections so my transfer rate can reach near 8MB/s, close to the 100Mbs fiber optic speed. Downloads are even faster but again I can vary my FTP connections as needed. Too bad I don't live in a big city which has gigabit internet service.
To take advantage and make sure your data is secure I tar and gpg my folders. I split the encrypted file into multiple 100MB files. I do a checksum before sending, after uploading, I download and recheck the checksum. Yes its a hassel doing this but my perl script makes most of this automatic. Its very important to recheck your ftp upload, by downloading them and make sure the checksum are matching. I will be rechecking my ftp upload for the lifetime I use livedrive, just to make sure my uploaded checked ftp files are not being corrupted. Of course if any of my verified ftp files were to get corrupted over time I will let everyone know about it, but so far FTP service has been reliable and have noticed no throttling except from my ISP since I try to send over 40GB a day.
Livedrive is not my daily backup, I have a file server using drobopro. I have a local backup of drobopro which I sync daily. Livedrive is my "if I lose everything" insurance like in a fire, flood, theft. Most likely I will never need to use livedrive backups.
For FTP service I would highly recommend livedrive but you need to take care of encryption, multiple ftp connections, checksums.
To be honest I wouldn't use the livedrive client. I would expect all connections from the client to livedrive to be encypted but its optional. The other thing I don't like is I don't see any Livedrive statement saying only you can see your data. If the livedrive staff were to reset your password, could they just download the unencypted file? Unless its written don't assume anything, except assume the worst case.
MarkT
1 Jan 10 at 7:38 am
I'm currently reviewing a number of online storage options and I'm surprised to see some comments here about the staff being able to view the data. This may come as a shock to some but most IT staff can see your data no matter what the company / service or product is…how else do you expect them to manage the system without this level of access. Furthermore there is the data protection act that needs to be adhered to, and is a criminal offence if you don't. Lastly most IT companies / support desks are run on a tight budget to maximise profit so the staff are very busy and don't spend their time sifting through other peoples data all day..sorry to blow your illusions but other peoples data is simply not that interesting.
James T
8 Jan 10 at 9:55 am
Livedrive has to be the worst backup solution I have ever tried. And good luck getting a refund due to poor support and software performance. The software completely bogged down my computer and the local cache file is just stupid. I already have a copy on my hard drive, I don't want another. Tried to cancel, no luck. Tried asking for refund, no luck. Will be submitting a dispute with my bank for the charge, but debit card charges are difficult to win, even if the company did not provide service as required.
Jason
27 Jul 10 at 3:09 pm
Livedrive seem to have improved a great deal in the last few months. They have always had the best features and at the best value with unlimited storage at only £3.95 per month. Now almost all the bugs seem to have gone its a great service. If you guys have checked it out for a while I sugest you have a look again. The features with the iPhone app are awsome such as streaming music and video!
dwb102
30 Jul 10 at 2:45 pm