So various happenings lately have led me to consider an online backup service. Now, I could just copy stuff to our dedicated box, but the process wouldn’t be automatic, so that’s no good, so I was led to BT’s Digital Vault. It all sounds fairly promising. 50GB of space, multiple computers, and automatic.
So I thought I would try it out. I signed up. Honestly this is where I should have backed out, as in order to sign up (for Digital Vault) I had to sign up to some third party “click and buy” service. I have no problem with third party payment services but don’t really see why this one required me to create an account. What’s more, they have a rather strange offering where I can “verify” my credit card to get “extra security”. Hmm, I am thinking, so is the standard service insecure? That’s a pretty poor show if it is the case. The privilege of verifying would charge my card somewhere between 2 pounds and 4 pounds. This money would then be “credited” to my click and buy account. Well, what use is that to me? None really. Plus whenever else I have verified an account, the retailer / service has credited me, not the other way around, and it’s usually some token amount, like 2p. Needless to say I have not taken up this generous offer. Anyway, I digress, as that has little to do with the Vault itself.
So I signed up, and waited for my promised introductory email. I waited some more. I got 3 emails from clickandbuy, and nothing from BT digital vault. In fact I am still waiting for my welcome email from Digital Vault. I went ahead and signed in anyway and my details allowed me to connect and get the software. -1 for that, really.
So then I installed the auto-backup software, rebooted, and waited a while for it to come to life. So far so good. I clicked through the easy setup process. Good. Lets you fine tune what you want to backup, and tells you how much space you’ll use. I clicked “Start backup now” and sat back with a smug grin. My grin did not last long.
The upload process is very, very slow. I left it to run for a few hours, thinking it might zip through my files. I was wrong. It managed something like 80 out of 32000 potential files in a few hours. Not big files either, I’m talking jpgs here. At that rate it would take until mid-January of continous backup time to complete the operation. Not good.
What’s more, whilst this activity was (not) taking place, all other web browsing was slowed to a crawl. I did a speed test whilst the auto-backup was running – ping time-out, download 140k, upload 14k. Where the heck was all my bandwidth going? It certainly wasn’t going into uploading my backup, because that was doing maybe one file every 3 minutes. I stopped the auto-backup and re-did the speed test, and results were instantly back to normal for my dsl connection. So it saps all the network bandwidth, yet doesn’t use it. I’m at a loss. The Vista network util graph never went above 1%.
So I really don’t know. At the moment, the product is useless. I have submitted a support ticket to BT, but so far have only the automated response. pings to the vault are fine all the way into BT’s network, but then time out, so it’s not a problem at my end. I’ll see what they say, but in anticipation of a lame reply, I’ve cancelled my “click and buy” subscription. (Which I assume means I’ve cancelled the vault subscription. I couldn’t say if that’s true because I have no welcome email…..)
In other news, there’s a facebook virus going around. Watch for any odd emails.
