VIDEO: LiveDrive Cloud Storage and Backup Review

Welcome. Today we'll be looking at Livedrive, a cloud storage and file syncing solution for consumers and businesses. We're looking at their business version. This review is brought to you by Technology Advice and the Smart Advisor tool, which lets you compare over 50 cloud storage and backup companies in under 2 minutes. Now, Livedrive's business offering combines a few different services. It backs up all of your office computers, provides a file sharing and syncing mechanism for employees, and allows teams to collaborate on group projects.

So, they have both an online administrative portal where IT department will use to manage user privileges, and also some desktop software which your employees will directly interact with. On the website, which we have pulled up right here, you can download desktop apps for automatic backup and syncing. Um you can download a restore app, uh which automates the process of restoring uh a large number of files in case you've lost a whole hard drive. Um it'll be a lot quicker than individually getting those off of their online system.

And um they have apps for viewing your files. Um they actually have it for iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile, which is um more than most of these offer. And then, we can show you what it looks like for a typical user. This is the admin portal, so you have some more advanced options, but we can view it as a user would see their um their online portal. And it's just going to give you pretty much the basic team folders, um backup, files you want to share over the web, and their individual settings, and a brief overview of what's going on right here.

One of the cooler features of Livedrive, though, you'll notice this little briefcase button. And that's that Livedrive has the ability to give each employee a semi-private file syncing system. They call these briefcases, and each employee can use theirs to store files they'll need on the go or outside of the office, and the files are only viewable by that employee and the business administrator. So, it functions pretty much like Dropbox or or Box, and just simplifies taking files home for your employees, and maybe alleviates some of the worry the businesses have about employees emailing files to their personal accounts or removing them from the business ecosystem.

There are also team folders, which work in a similar manner to briefcases, but are shared between multiple users. These will be helpful for creative teams or group projects that necessitate a lot of file sharing or the sharing of really large files. And a web sharing that allows you to post files online with a custom URL. It's generally your business .livedrive.com, and that'll be the public public URL, and anything you post there, you can direct clients or um you know, direct your business clients there to get white papers or media files.

And then, let's pull up the desktop software here. This is what it'll look like, the settings that individual users will be able to control on their own desktops. Um and there's pretty much just the be options right here. It's going to give you a little overview. Um under advanced, you can choose the drive letter you want for your briefcase, and that's just going to sit like an external drive, very similar to Dropbox. And uh you can limit the download or upload bandwidth um if you want to save your internet connection and keep it free.

Um you'll have some options here about your how you want to be backed up, if you want them all online or online and on your computer. And you'll be able to uh tell Livedrive what your um preferences are for the first files it backs up and what can kind of wait for later. So, you're just giving it a priority list. And then for security, um you'll be able to encrypt all your transfers and encrypt all the files in your briefcase, and they should pretty much just all be turned on.

The pros of Livedrive are that it combines automatic backup and storage services in one application. The briefcases for employees help businesses monitor where files go. And they offer support for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile. The drawbacks of Livedrive, um it doesn't support server backup, just workstations. And they don't have physical media restore, which means you'll have to use that restore application we mentioned earlier if some of you if you lose files or some of your hard drives go down, they won't mail you hard drives um with your files on them.

Thanks for watching this review of Livedrive. Before making any cloud storage purchases, we recommend that you go to technologyadvice.com and use the Smart Advisor tool, which will let you compare Livedrive to over 50 different cloud storage and backup companies. Oh.

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.