Just Cloud is a terrible backup service
Posted on 23rd Jan 2013 at 13:33 by Antony Leather with 48 comments
So, I’ve been duped. The story began in my quest for a hefty online backup service. I was after something in excess of 100GB to backup my important photos and other paraphernalia – stuff I’d probably shed a few tears over if the house was burgled or burned down.
Needless to say, anything like that isn’t totally safe in your home, even if it's backed up. And not one to go through the palava of dumping stuff onto an external backup drive and leaving at my parent's house, I was also happy to ditch the idea of buying a 2TB drive and shoving it in the shed and investigate online backups instead.
There are plenty of unlimited services available, but one in particular seemed fresh and new and well, too good to be true basically. What an idiot. At least that’s what I told myself initially but then I realised that not all the reviews I’d read of Just Cloud were on what I later found to be affiliate websites. Some were well-known review websites, whose editorial teams had either not used the package in its retail entirety or, well, no I’m not even going to go there.
One site I’m now particularly loathe to even think of is www.toptenreviews.com and its seemingly decent roundup of online backup services which included the likes of Dropbox and Carbonite.
Just Cloud came out on top, with the only ‘con’ being ‘The service doesn't provide technical support via telephone.’ I can’t tell you how wrong that is. By far my main gripe, given how many websites seem to rave about Just Cloud's great value at less than ten bucks a month for unlimited storage and amazing features, is that it’s nothing of the sort. At least not if you want all the features and a decent service.
Ten bucks buys you a decrepit, painfully slow and generally poor backup service. But about five minutes of exploring I saw the first pop-up appear saying I could get a faster backup for X amount more cash a year, or add more than one computer to the backup service for, you guessed it, more cash.
This went on and on, until I realised that unless I paid through the nose for numerous extra features, the service was in my view completely and utterly useless, inferior to its competitors and therefore terrible value if you were an idiot and paid for all these unknown extras on top of the usual annual fee. Strangely, nothing is mentioned about this in reviews (nor on Just Cloud's website).
Having hit a brick wall, I then tried to cancel. I spent the next half an hour finding out how on earth to do this and eventually found I had to email them to cancel. This took at least four attempts, each time being met with a generic response about me maybe having trouble and could they assist me.
Somehow they didn't seem to get the message I felt ripped off and wanted my money back. I was then offered six month’s free backup credits, whatever they are, before finally being given a URL to a secret-looking website, not accessible from my actual Just Cloud account, where I was finally able to cancel. Of course by this point I could also kiss goodbye to my refund as well as any self-respect.
Rant over. To sum up, beware of Just Cloud and any review or forum user preaching its wonders. Dig hard enough and you’ll find hundreds of other unfortunate victims of this terrible and misleading service.
Which online back services do you recommend? Have you ever encountered a service like this? Let us know in the forum.
Needless to say, anything like that isn’t totally safe in your home, even if it's backed up. And not one to go through the palava of dumping stuff onto an external backup drive and leaving at my parent's house, I was also happy to ditch the idea of buying a 2TB drive and shoving it in the shed and investigate online backups instead.
There are plenty of unlimited services available, but one in particular seemed fresh and new and well, too good to be true basically. What an idiot. At least that’s what I told myself initially but then I realised that not all the reviews I’d read of Just Cloud were on what I later found to be affiliate websites. Some were well-known review websites, whose editorial teams had either not used the package in its retail entirety or, well, no I’m not even going to go there.
One site I’m now particularly loathe to even think of is www.toptenreviews.com and its seemingly decent roundup of online backup services which included the likes of Dropbox and Carbonite.
Just Cloud came out on top, with the only ‘con’ being ‘The service doesn't provide technical support via telephone.’ I can’t tell you how wrong that is. By far my main gripe, given how many websites seem to rave about Just Cloud's great value at less than ten bucks a month for unlimited storage and amazing features, is that it’s nothing of the sort. At least not if you want all the features and a decent service.
Ten bucks buys you a decrepit, painfully slow and generally poor backup service. But about five minutes of exploring I saw the first pop-up appear saying I could get a faster backup for X amount more cash a year, or add more than one computer to the backup service for, you guessed it, more cash.
Click to enlarge
This went on and on, until I realised that unless I paid through the nose for numerous extra features, the service was in my view completely and utterly useless, inferior to its competitors and therefore terrible value if you were an idiot and paid for all these unknown extras on top of the usual annual fee. Strangely, nothing is mentioned about this in reviews (nor on Just Cloud's website).
Having hit a brick wall, I then tried to cancel. I spent the next half an hour finding out how on earth to do this and eventually found I had to email them to cancel. This took at least four attempts, each time being met with a generic response about me maybe having trouble and could they assist me.
Somehow they didn't seem to get the message I felt ripped off and wanted my money back. I was then offered six month’s free backup credits, whatever they are, before finally being given a URL to a secret-looking website, not accessible from my actual Just Cloud account, where I was finally able to cancel. Of course by this point I could also kiss goodbye to my refund as well as any self-respect.
Rant over. To sum up, beware of Just Cloud and any review or forum user preaching its wonders. Dig hard enough and you’ll find hundreds of other unfortunate victims of this terrible and misleading service.
Which online back services do you recommend? Have you ever encountered a service like this? Let us know in the forum.
48 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyI'm also using crashplan, which is okay, but a bit slow...
For dedicated back-up I would recommend crashplan ...NASA use it!
They use open source and in-house built software, and they documented how they built their storage pods cheaply, complete with the bill of materials and CAD designs. At least for that they're worth some attention.
Oh, and they offer unlimited storage space for $5 / month.
You don't even *need* to buy cloud storage for it, if you know someone with spare space, and they're willing to store stuff for you (perhaps you could do the same back). Backups are encrypted, and like I say, can work on a peer to peer basis as well as to CrashPlan's cloud service.
As it's Java, I can run it on Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris - my NAS is ZFS on Solaris, and CrashPlan backs up my data there too. And because CrashPlan capable of backing up to more than one location, I back up my main PC to two locations using CrashPlan: the cloud, and my NAS. That way, if it's just a matter of deleted files, I can get them back very quickly, while still having the security of a remote backup.
For me, Mozy / Carbonite / etc. are no competition at all.
Why on earth did you not go for one of the better established players? Crashplan, Carbonite, Mozy, Backblaze, Databaracks? To name but five in no particular order.
"Fresh and New" isn't what you want for online backup.
Also. I think this article is not up to the usual BT standards. It's not a professional critique of a service but a personal rant without any facts and figures to back up the claims being made. I don't doubt the experience you had Antony as it mirrors what is said elsewhere but a little less rant and a little more fact would have been more appropriate.
*edit* My only complaint with Crashplan and this might be caused by something else, I have 6.5mbit/s up but I'm only getting 200KB/s uploaded. Could be the university capping me, could be slow drives, could be a lack of CPU power for encryption/compression, I haven't really tried to trace it yet.
I love the fact that you can sync multiple folders across multiple platforms and the new beta feature shows your storage space as a networked drive in explorer which is a great idea.
i need a hug.
They were all more much more expensive - I was looking for 100GB+ of storage and at face value Justcloud seemed to offer more features too, plus, while it was new, it had been reviewed not just by dodgy sites but by several well-known, respectable ones too. It wasn't all rant to be honest :D - I did mention the cost, the fact it was painfully slow without the upload speed upgrade, the fact the roundup I read at www.toptenreviews.com is highly suspect and that the basic package being devoid of many features other services include as standard. It's also true there's nothing to tell you this before you sign up. Sorry I didn't include more factual evidence but it's not a review or feature or professional critique. It's a 600 word blog so part personal opinion/rant, part factual info is part of the course :D
You can always rely on some know it all to make you feel better.
Get over it. It's a blog!
I feel your pain, we've all been had at some point. Now where did i put that £2000 vacuum cleaner
I'm now on Mozy, as I was getting slow upload speeds from Crashplan for a while. However, I'll be going back to my former cloud backup service once my subscription with Mozy ends as it's not a patch on Crashplan. The only thing in Mozy's favour are the upload speeds as Crashplan's servers, I believe, are based in the US.
Here's a good article on Ars Technica about Crashplan:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/crashplan-is-cloud-backup-for-literally-everyone/
Photobucket can be used only for images since it doesn't have a limit to how much you can upload of it.
MediaFire is the one I using as cloud/backup storage because the free account provides 50GB, it looks simple and easy to use, I'm still exploring.
Skydrive is pretty much straightforward as Google Drive, every folder is set to private and the sharing options are very restrict to prevent unwanted sharing. Box is another service which I still have to explore.
Dropbox I try to avoid its use because I have some considerable space but it has an expiration date so I'm waiting to see the real storage space.
Vodafone Cloud works as the smartphone backup/cloud storage albeit I can use it via browser and like a normal cloud storage.
Windows, Mac, Linux (GTK and QT), Android, iOS, Web clients. 5GB free, extra 20GB from referrals.
Fast in US, even though servers are in Europe.
..........Pfffhahahahahahahahah, I'm just f*$%in' with you!
My mate went in to pick up one of those web only 1tb usb3 hdd for £49.99 the other day and got hammered by the sales dude claiming it was the best back-up cloud storage in the country and he wouldn't need the hdd even though the physical storage was 3 times cheaper!
Yes it will cost me money to download it ALL again (roughly £60) should my NAS fail, but for the price it can't be beaten for bulk backup.
That's the sort of thing you guys would do well :)
It's a blog piece???
I hate the idea of a cloud service not owned or administrated by me... so I concur. But it's not for everyone.
I personally think it is good that blogs like this exist. Whether people think it is an opinion piece or not, this users experience would not be heard amongst the drudgery of marketing social media and Press Release spin for all the Google weighting in the world they generate. Sites like this are independent and, within certain categories, reputable, with demonstrably knowledgeable readers.
So not only does the article establish some "cons" washed over by less convincing sources, but the contribution by readers adds more value than leagues of those one sided comparison charts that marketing inevitably use. I should know... I've written a few in other industries. Luckily for me though, my company(that I work for) is platform agnostic, so I have the complete opposite task assigned to me; create balance where there is some and "for god's sake Lawrence, don't piss anyone off."
I can speak from experience that the quality of any cloud service is very heavily dependent on the quality of your Internet connection and the software they provide. Packet loss and instability have actually caused just as many problems as a lack of bandwidth and I've found that the software provided to upload to cloud backups is extremely immature compared to "real" convention backup programs.
The most common problem I've had is my client's scheduled backups stalling without any kind of notification that anything went wrong, or other issues that have gone unlogged and unnotified that any backup system worth it's salt would have kicked up a massive stink about. I've no doubt that this will get a lot better over time, of course.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a bag full of usb sticks.
Lol, + rep. :D ;)
You own the HDDs, as much space as you can afford to purchase.
Do note you need access to a server....
upgrade to the USB movement :D
They support incremental backups and de-duplication, and they also encrypt your files using AES-256, but not sure if that's a properly safe encryption or if they have the master keys stashed for their own use.
Also I don't know what that previous comment about Jungle Disk's prices going up are about, they've been dropping steadily since I started using it. In terms of support, I've never needed to contact them so I wouldn't know how good or bad it is.
+1 for owncloud and the ownclient client app.
I am waiting for the 500GB sweet spot to come down to $10.00/mth. That is when I will jump in. That will probably be with Google or Amazon I suppose.
Not as cheap as some ($100 a year for 100gb), but it's zero knowledge on their part, so your data is inaccessible to them which appeals to me.
A few customers use Crashplan, that seems pretty effective too. The rest.. Meh. Don't apply - I wanted the ability to sync two folders on different machines, and at the time I went to spideroak nothing offered that for the same money. Windows live mesh/skydrive did, but that just kept failing to install.
with amazon glacier you can store vast amout of data for ponies!
http://www.cloudberrylab.com/amazon-s3-microsoft-azure-google-storage-online-backup.aspx
http://blog.cloudberrylab.com/2012/11/how-to-archive-amazon-s3-data-to.html
:)
you can even store backups to google storage or microsoft cloud storage, take your pick and let it run :)
:D
I'm currently considering idrive or idrivesync or perhaps crashplan.
Removing external drives would then on next process remove said drive from the cloud. If you wanted to retrieve it, you'd then have to go through the cloud recycle bin and restore them (slowly)
Total con.