Lately I felt the need to have all my 60 GB of personal data stored in the cloud, mostly because maintaining a backup plan is a pain. Besides, I’m using an oldish PC with a dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM Windows Server 2008 as NAS, which is a bit overkill and wastes a lot of energy, even if it wakes automatically at a certain time in the day, performs the backup and then shuts down.
Between all the alternatives, TrendMicro SafeSync (formerly known as Humyo) seemed the most affordable service. Most notably, it offers unlimited space for less than 45€/year and also sports an Android client. After a whopping 30-day free trial, I decided to purchase the service as everything looked great. I was happy.
I started pushing several gigabytes worth of data, and then all hells broke loose. Cut a long story short, I got 300+ files randomly moved to SafeSync’s recycle bin and, after two days of re-tries, crashes and what-not, 49 files were not getting synchronized, no matter what I did. Preemptive comment: those files were not locked by other programs.
Moreover, upload and download speed was awful. I never got anything above 300 kbit/s on a symmetric 10 MBit/s connection.
I simply cannot force myself to trust a data storage service like that, so I looked on TrendMicro support site, discovered that I could get a full refund and applied for it. This morning, not seeing any refund in my PayPal account, I sent an email to TrendMicro’s support service and in less than 30 minutes I got a response. Funnily enough in the meantime I received the refund…
So, kudos to TrendMicro for their fast customer service, but that does not make SafeSync any better…
And now, off to Dropbox. Terribly expensive, but rock-solid. And it has LAN Sync too!