Livedrive - Don't Use Them!

I won't be updating this post any more. You can follow progress here now: Livedrive Updates

Update 18/10/2011. Incredibly, it has now been 47 days since I first asked Live Drive for help. It has been 43 days since they have made any attempt to contact me, and 19 days since I telephoned them to be told that my problem was being escalated to senior management and that someone would be in touch. I feel sorry for the poor person who runs their Twitter account, because he or she tried to tell me someone would be in touch, although they too are now ignoring me, and they seem to spend their time fending off complaints with a pretty standard "Someone from support will get in touch with you." I find it incredible that any business can continue to function in this way. I'm left wondering if this attitude to customers is driven from the top by Andrew Michael, Michael Hogan and Nick Cowell, or is what's going on being kept well away from them by a bunch of incompetents in middle management?

Update 03/10/2011. Still not a word. Despite her promise on 30th September, I didn't even get the email from the young lady confirming my case had been escalated. Another comment below from someone who has been similarly let down, and the Livedrive Twitter stream seems to have "stopped."

Update 30/9/2011. Still no response from anywhere. I telephoned Livedrive (not cheap from Spain) and spoke to a young lady. After listening to my tale of woe, she put me on hold to go and talk to her manager. After a few moments she came back to me to tell me that my issue had been escalated to senior management. I asked her when I could expect to hear from someone and she replied she couldn't say. I told her that social media was full of stories of people being badly let down by Livedrive and she told me that they did have issues in support and were trying very hard to recruit more staff to deal with the backlog. I asked her specifically if the company was in trouble and she told me they aren't. I reiterated that I can deal with the loss of data if that's the case, but that what I have found unforgivable is the fact that nobody is talking to me after paying for a service for some time. She promised to pass that on and to email me a response to my ticket confirming that my case has been escalated to senior management. I'll keep you posted.

Update 26/9/2011. Despite writing the post below a week ago and sending a link to it via both email and Twitter, I still have had no response from Livedrive. They seem to have adopted a policy of burying their heads in the sand and ignoring me. Very sad.

Some of you may remember that I wrote a post back in April, extolling the virtues of the Live Drive backup service which I had been using for some time. If you missed it, here it is: Livedrive Cloud Storage.

It’s with regret that I have to withdraw my recommendation.

I don’t like it when people throw their weight around on social media when a business has made a mistake. But Livedrive’s decision to ignore me as a client with a problem leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth – the more so because other people have used the service on my recommendation.

The short story is their backup service didn’t work for me when I needed it, and their support system has been the worst I have ever experienced from a company to whom I have been paying money.

In case you want the long story, here it is:

1/ I bought the unlimited account with briefcase in December 2010 and have since paid €10.95 a month. We went with Livedrive because they offered an unlimited back up service. My wife’s computer stores a massive amount of data – business critical accounts files as well as all our family photos since we went digital in 1999.

2/ On the 7th September, my wife’s computer died. It just refused to boot at all. No problem, I thought – we’re backed up! And I headed straight into town and came back with a shiny new PC.  After getting everything set up, we hunted around in Livedrive help (it wasn’t easy) and found the link to download the restore tool. We set it running and relaxed back in to our work with smug expressions on our faces for having been so prudent.

3/ On the 8th September, we realised something was wrong. The photo folders were simply being restored “too quickly.” A look into them revealed that less than 30% of the images were actually being restored. When I checked in the online system, I could see that most of our photos were coming up with the phrase “This file has no content.” I immediately emailed Livedrive support with this:

Hello

I have been using Livedrive for many months. My wife's PC suffered a major crash the other day and we replaced it with a new one. We used the restore tool to try to restore all our images, and found only a small percentage were actually there!

With most, we are getting this message:  This file has no content, please edit this file on your PC first

Can you please tell me what has happened and how we can restore everything?

Regards

Mike

I got an auto response with a ticket number and waited for a reply.

4/ On 12th September this came through:

Hi,
We recently discovered an issue with our support system which caused a small number of support tickets to be lost.  This problem is now resolved, but from analysing our records it appears that you may have submitted a support ticket during this period which we haven't received.  We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience that this may have caused - please be assured that we normally get back to all tickets within 24 hours.

If you are still having issues with your Livedrive account or need help with any aspect of the service, please get in touch and our support team will get back to you promptly.  Just email support@livedrivesupport.com to resubmit your ticket.  Please include as much information about your problem as possible.

If you are having trouble with the Livedrive desktop software for Mac or PC, have you tried the latest version?  The latest version of the software includes some significant improvements to Livedrive Backup, and a number of minor bug fixes.  You can see more information here:
http://blog.livedrive.com/2011/09/livedrive-backup-just-became-even-more-powerful/
Best regards,
Livedrive Team

I immediately responded with a copy of my original email and once again got a ticket number via auto response.

5/ On 13th September I received this:

Hi Mike,
Thank you for contacting Livedrive support.
We are sorry to hear you are experiencing problems with the software.
It sounds like the file hasn't been fully uploaded in the first place.
Could you give us two or three examples so that we can run a test over here?
Regards,
Kat

I sent examples and a link to some of the folders straight back to Kat.

Since then I have not had a single word from Livedrive!

Despite:

• Emailing them again twice more
• Asking for help on both Facebook and Twitter
• Taking an educated guess at the CEO’s email address and contacting him directly – it didn’t bounce so I assume someone got it.

We’re now at day eleven of this saga and I’ve already wasted too much time on it. I don’t know if they can fix the problem, or even if I did something wrong in the set up or restore operation. But to leave a paying customer high and dry – someone who is obviously deeply concerned and needs some help - is unforgivable.

Livedrive don’t know this, but I managed to recover all of the data (expensively) from the hard drives after a week of waiting for their help.

I’ll be more than happy to update this post with any response from them, although after reading various comments around the net, I won’t be holding my breath.