News & Views

Knowhow - Livedrive

As a professional photographer, it is essential to have a comprehensive image back-up system as part of my everyday workflow.

I have been using Livedrive as part of this routine for nearly a year. My work is backed up onto remote external drives, with a final copy sent to the Livedrive servers via a link on my desktop.

All seemed to working perfectly until three weeks ago when I experienced the inevitable hard drive failure. After replacing the unit with a brand new 3TB hard drive, I made a mirror back up and checked out my Livedrive account.

My images which corresponded to the failed drive had been deleted and there appeared to be no way of 'undeleting' them. I immediately contacted Livedrive Support via email using the link on the Livedrive Web Portal. Three weeks, and three emails later, still no reply....except for a reminder that my Livedrive account was up for renewal! I spent this morning trying to find out 1/ Why were my images deleted? 2/ Why didn't I receive a response to my emails? Both the people I spoke to at Livedrive and Techguys weren't able to progress my complaint or sort my problem.

What is the point of going to the time and effort to back-up to the Livedrive server, if when your system fails, you find that your work has been deleted? When you 'delete' files on a computer, as a failsafe, it asks you to confirm your decision. Why doesn't the Livedrive system do this? I really fail to see the point of a service that tells you what you can keep and what you can't!

As they quote on their website: '...once you've set it up, you can just forget about it.' I agree.