Today I decided to try one of those online backup systems and my friend Alex pointed me to Xdrive.com

I signed up for a free trial, had to give them my creditcard that would be charged $9.99 for 5 GB in 15 days after the free trial ends…

Then I got to install some desktop backup software and tried to backup some megabytes for testing…

altough the initial login via web workd well, the answer after "backup now" was

I tried this a couple of times, with various setting changed all the time, as some of the are officially not working (like store path names ... )

Yes, reading the forums I see that the ‘with path options’ causes the backup to fail and that this has been a problem for months.

That would mean, even if it worked, it would not store the paths so that it would make the restore a HUGE issue as it doesn’t know where the files go…

Is this crazy? This company was bought by AOL back in August 2005 – and obviously they are having issues over issues since then…

also I don't like the following things:

• version 5.x of the software still lacks required basic func
• the "terminate account" function was removed – you have to call or email to cancel your account with them !
• Xdrive clients complain cannot restore their backups with similar dubious errors like mine

Of course there are a couple of other angry Xdrive users out there:

• http://blog.angrypets.com/2005/11/index.html
• http://www.workhappy.net/2005/08/xdrive.html
• Terrible Xdrive
• Problems at Xdrive

well – I think that's enough crazy stuff for today… I just mailed them to cancel my account effective immediately… you wouldn't trust them your credit card, not to speak of your data… would you?