Livedrive are a dishonest bunch - wouldn't now recommend at all
We are have been resellers for about three years now and have had nothing but trouble. Apart from anything else, their "support force one" support department are the most useless bunch of people I've ever had to deal with. Not their fault, it's clearly management. There's absolutely NO phone contact at all, which is par for the course these days.
We sell both backups and dropbox-style work folders to businesses. The model is that for around £40 a month we can sell unlimited backup accounts, and each backup account can in theory save unlimited backups. The price rise information is sketchy at best. All I know is that the backups won't be unlimited - we will have to pay £20 per GB per month over 5GB if you add up all our resold accounts together. But the other restrictions, like on a business account that might be costing £1000 a year for 20-odd users to have shared team folders, and backup all up to a limit of 1TB, I've just heard today won't include backup any more!
Onto more technical stuff. Livedrive offers one feature that as far as I can see, is not offered by Dropbox, Box, Google Drive etc. which is that you can mark certain files and folders as being "in cloud" only but the difference is that the files still show as a "stub" with a .ld extension, and double-clicking on one of these activates an automatic download from the livedrive cloud service, or a local computer is LAN sync is on.
This would be great if it wasn't for almost every customer we have having sync problems. Files that say they're not accessible because they're "not uploaded yet", for example. Or instances where files are "in cloud" and just won't download - they just sit there and say "downloading". Or people complaining that they've edited a file and none of their colleagues can see the latest version. Sometimes we see hundreds of files that show as "haven't been uploaded yet" on the livedrive website and we cannot locate where they should have come from.
Livedrive do clever deduping, so if anyone anywhere (even other clients not known to us) has uploaded a file, upload will be instant. This can go wrong too: in one instance, several hundred files wouldn't upload because it thought they'd already been uploaded. Livedrive support could have helped, and they ended up telling us that the only way to upload them was to make one small change to EACH FILE. When I told Livedrive support that working 8-hour shifts, it would take 6 months to do this for all the files we have found, they said that yes they know it's a long process but that's the only way!
When things go wrong, we often have to do an "integrity check" which takes ages and doesn't always work.
And onto the backup side of things. On paper, backups seems great - any changed file is backed up on an hourly schedule. And the last 30 versions of any file are accessible, and kept. Deleted files are accessible too. The same applies to files in the actual briefcase/teamfolder.
So for an individual file, restoring it to any version is easy. Just pick the file, pick the version by date, and bingo!
But imagine a scenario where a crypto-style virus as encrypted half your files. What then? Livedrive told us at once point that if this happens, they should be able to help restore all files to a particular date and time, and then let us download them. But when it actually happened to one of our customers, they said it would not be possible. The only way to restore all files back to before a particular date was to go in one by one, to their website, and pick the right version file, and restore it. When I explained that there were over 100,000 files, they just said that was the only way!!!
In fact, the last time we saw a virus do this kind of damage, the virus had renamed the files first, and the version information was NOT stored at all in livedrive.
The support we get is frankly shite, they answer with stock answers like "reinstall it" and never give us the help we need.
We are gradually moving over our customers to dropbox where possible.
Perhaps we should set up a facebook group or even set up a domain, I'll pay for it even, where we can maybe get together with other livedrive users and won't have our comments deleted!
annoyedwithlivedrive.co.uk
livedriveareshit.co.uk
livedriveymclivdriveface.co.uk?