Livedrive Backup Personal
This cloud service has the distinction of a UK data centre, but the single-PC service is relatively pricey
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PRICE £6 (£7 inc VAT) per month from livedrive.com
Livedrive is a cloud backup service similar to IDrive and Carbonite, with a £7 monthly fee that buys you continuous, unlimited cloud backup for a single PC or Mac. There’s a five-device Pro Suite option for £15 too, which adds support for Android and iOS, along with a Dropbox-style sync tool called Briefcase.
One thing that sets Livedrive apart right away is that it’s priced in pounds: although ultimately owned by US tech giant J2 Global, Livedrive is a British company with a data centre in the UK, so you don’t have to wonder about your backups residing in a foreign jurisdiction.
The interface is simple, but there are a few things to configure. Your standard personal folders are covered by default, but you can add other locations, including as many external drives as you like. NAS volumes can be included for an extra £5 per month, which isn’t a bad deal if you have terabytes of accumulated data to protect.
Click into Advanced settings and you can set upstream and downstream bandwidth caps, exclude specific files and folders from your backup and tell Livedrive how often to check for updated files, with options ranging from once an hour to every two days. There’s also an option to suspend the backup process entirely, but you’ll have to manually unpause it again when you want protection to resume.
Although Livedrive’s servers are geographically closer than most, performance is only so-so: we waited just over 50 minutes for our 2GB test folder to upload. And while all data is AES-256 encrypted before transfer, you can’t set your own encryption key, so you’ll have to put your faith in Livedrive’s internal security to protect your privacy.
Files and folders can be restored from within the
Livedrive client and, once you select an item to be restored, you’ll see details of up to 30 historical versions, from which you can pick the one you want to recover. Alternatively, you can browse your archive at the Livedrive website, which has the benefit of showing handy image thumbnails, and allowing you to preview certain file types such as PDFs.
If you want to protect a mass of data that’s spread across multiple computers, Livedrive’s Pro Suite package is an appealing deal. The Personal plan is a harder sell, though: IDrive ( see p81) is a more rounded solution, as it includes local backup and disk imaging – and it also happens to be cheaper.