Livedrive is an online backup service with two unlimited backup plans to choose from, both of which can be customized and fine-tuned to work best for your setup. You might not have heard much about Livedrive but they’ve been in business since 2008 and have over 1 million customers. If Livedrive seems like something you may be interested in, keep reading for more details on the plans it offers, the features you’ll be able to take advantage of, and our thoughts on how it worked for me.
Livedrive Plans & Costs
Valid December 2022 Livedrive offers two unlimited backup plans:
Livedrive Backup
This is the least expensive plan you can buy from Livedrive. It offers an unlimited amount of space to back up as many files as you’d like from one computer. Livedrive Backup runs $8.99 /month, or $7.50 /month if you opt for the yearly plan ($89.90).
Livedrive Pro Suite
Livedrive Pro Suite also supports an unlimited amount of backup space, but it lets you back up up to 5 computers instead of just one. Livedrive Pro Suite is $25 /month. The yearly plan is $240, making the monthly equivalent $20 /month. Pro Suite also includes a built-in plan called Briefcase, which gives you 5 TB of cloud space you can use for storing files online. The difference between Briefcase and the regular backup feature of Pro Suite is that the files aren’t backed up automatically. Instead, you treat Briefcase like another hard drive attached to your computer, and everything you copy to it is uploaded to your 5 TB account. Files and folders you put in your Briefcase automatically copy to the other computers you have attached to your account. Plus, you can share files from your Briefcase with anyone you like, and easily copy files from your Pro Suite account into your Briefcase. Livedrive Briefcase can be purchased outside the Pro Suite plan, or even in addition to the Backup plan, but it’s not a true backup service in and of itself. If you purchase this alone, you get 2 TB of space for $16 /month (or $13 /month if you pay $156 for a year at once), otherwise it comes with 5 TB of storage as part of Pro Suite. Livedrive Business is another plan offered by Livedrive that’s aimed for the whole office with support for cloud collaboration, more users, lots of cloud storage space, file sharing, a central admin control panel, FTP access, and more. Livedrive doesn’t have a free backup plan, but any of its paid plans can be tried for a period of 14 days before you commit to buying a subscription to the service. Payment information is required to activate the trial, but you aren’t charged until the trial runs out. If you’re new to online backup and would like to try out a free plan first, see our list of free online backup plans for some of those.
Livedrive Features
Files you back up with Livedrive will immediately begin uploading to your online account with unlimited space to hold it all, which is exactly how a backup service should be. Here are more features you can find in Livedrive’s plans: However, as with everything, there are some pros and cons you’ll need to weigh before deciding whether you should buy a Livedrive plan.
What We Like
First and foremost, we really like that you can back up folders to Livedrive from the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer. This makes backing up easier than having to open the settings and then select the folders you want to upload. While Livedrive is backing up your files, you can tell it to suspend backing up the one it’s currently uploading in case it’s taking too long, which is handy. It’s also useful if you don’t necessarily care to back up that particular file right away, and would rather open up that upload room for something more important. While uploading files through our Livedrive account, we noticed it was using the max speed we allowed the program to use (through the bandwidth controls). Overall, in our experience, uploading data to Livedrive was as speedy as most other backup services we’ve used. Something else we like about Livedrive is their mobile apps. If you’ve backed up music to your account, you can use the built-in music player to find all your music files and play them back right from the app. Documents, images, and videos can also be viewed and streamed through the app, which most people will probably appreciate. You can even set up your mobile device to automatically back up your images and videos, which is great if you like to keep your mobile media files backed up.
What We Don’t Like
The first thing we should mention is that you can only back up folders with Livedrive. What this means is that you can’t select an entire hard drive, nor can you choose single files, to back up. The program only lets you select folders. This means if you want to back up an entire hard drive, you have to place a check next to the folders at its root to ensure all the files inside those folders are actually backed up. Something else we don’t like is that Livedrive doesn’t back up every single file that you tell it to, which is different from some similar backup services that do back up all files, no matter their file extension. Cookies, browser cache files, settings files, virtual machine files, application data, temporary files, and some system files are permanently disabled from being backed up. This means there’s a handful of files Livedrive won’t back up for you, which is worth understanding before you commit to a backup plan. We also don’t like that Livedrive supports keeping only 30 versions of your files. This means after 30 edits of any particular file, the older ones will begin to delete from Livedrive’s servers, which means you can’t rely on an unlimited number of versions of your files like you can with some other backup services. Livedrive also only keeps deleted files for 30 days. This means whether you delete the file from your computer, or simply remove the drive that the file was originally located at, you’ll only have 30 days before it’s permanently irrecoverable from your backups. When restoring files with Livedrive, you, unfortunately, can’t use the web app to download folders, as it only supports restoring files. For restoring folders, you have to use the desktop program. Something else to think about before choosing Livedrive is that some users have reported that the Livedrive support team isn’t so great at responding to issues you might be having with the service. This could be completely subjective, but it’s something to think about nonetheless.
Final Thoughts on Livedrive
We think Livedrive is a great choice if you’re looking for a combination of features that you just can’t find in a higher-rated plan, especially if you’d like to include a cloud storage-type addition (i.e. Livedrive Briefcase). Not sure Livedrive is what you’re after? Be sure you check out our full reviews of Backblaze and Carbonite, either of which might be a better fit.
