Livedrive

A fairly minimal service that offers decent backup performance, but doesn’t quite stack up on value

SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE From £5 per month per PC, unlimited storage from livedrive.com

Livedrive is yet another lightweight backup client offering unlimited cloud storage. It’s a bit more expensive than rivals, but you might appreciate not having to commit on a yearly basis.

Getting started is easy. You can select folders to be backed up by drilling down a directory tree in the main console; external drives can be added as well as internal ones – although USB flash drives aren’t supported – and up to 30 older versions of updated files are retained.

It’s also a decent performer: our 5GB folder of personal data was backed up in 2hrs 18mins, which isn’t bad at all, and when we hit restore, the files came back down the line in 33

minutes. It probably helps that the data doesn’t have so far to travel as it does with other backup systems: Livedrive’s datacentre is located here in the UK.

In light of recent legislation, if you’re worried about privacy, that may not be a good thing, and it’s worth noting that Livedrive doesn’t support custom encryption keys, so there’s no way to ensure that the company can’t access your files. You can however password-protect the client itself, so that intruders can’t mess with your backup regime.

When it comes to advanced features, there’s not much on offer. You can adjust the frequency of backup runs, but your options are limited. You can either tell Livedrive to upload new files at a fixed interval, ranging from one to 48 hours, or launch a backup every day at a set time. Network throttling is available too, but the configuration options are similarly basic: there’s no scheduling element, so you can’t set uploads to be slow during the day and fast at night.

The client also invites you to set up your Livedrive Briefcase – a Dropboxtype service that automatically

ABOVE Livedrive restored our files in 33 minutes, probably helped by the data centre’s UK location synchronises your files across multiple PCs. This requires a separate subscription costing £10 a month. That’s not necessarily a bad deal, as it gets you a whopping 2TB of storage, but we find it a little distasteful to see a paid product pushing additional services.

Livedrive handles the basics perfectly well, but it’s a strippeddown solution that lacks features such as multiple backup sets, hybrid backup to local devices and custom encryption. Even if you don’t need those features, it’s also more expensive than its direct competitors, so we’d suggest you look elsewhere.