Let’s face it, our music libraries are growing day by day as are the number of devices you want to be able to play them on. Streaming sites like Spotify and Rhapsody are ok as long as you only listen to what they have. If you cherish your eclectic and unique music collection, you need another solution. Livedrive may provide the solution you are looking for. Before you leap however, you need to read this article for some important guidance and tips.
What is Livedrive and how did they get their start?
Livedrive is an online cloud backup and file storage service that has grown to claim being the number 1 service in America and the UK. They allow users to share up to 5 TB of storage between devices including mobile devices, phones, tablets, and PCs. They currently support iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows 8, Mac OS X, and Google Chrome OS. They were founded in 2008 by renown entrepreneur Andrew Michael who had the business savvy to walk away from a 100 million pound offer early on, knowing Livedrive would be worth it. In 2010 they added personal music and streaming to their account offerings giving us the ability to listen to our own music collections or watching movies on a remote computer or device.
How can Livedrive solve your problem?
Livedrive supports personal media streaming for subscribers at no additional cost. We are able to listen to our own music collections on a remote PC or device all from shared storage in the cloud, accessible from anywhere. Once our files are uploaded we can browse by artist, genre, or year. Music files stream at adaptive bitrates. The service was designed with iPads in mind. The locker on Livedrive integrates with Apple’s iWork as well as other online apps like the Zoho suite.
A few things you must know before buying:
The file synchronization functionality is what you want for your music library. This is available in both the Briefcase plan with 2TB of space and the Pro Suite plan with 5TB of space. You can try either, Risk Free without a credit card for 2 weeks.
Livedrive will NOT ask for your credit card in order to sign up for their trial. Do not enter a credit card until you are satisfied with the service and wish to continue. This creates a RISK FREE environment for you so you can see for yourself how well the service works for sharing your music collection.
Beware the resellers! Lifedrive has many resellers that front the product. Many if not all of the negative experiences you see out there are from the resellers. If you buy and deal direct with Livedrive you will have far fewer issues. Enlist through the resellers at your own risk. There are many reviews that confirm this.
Livedrive hasn’t always delivered perfect services. Most notable was a fairly large outage in 2012 that left users without access to files for multiple days. This naturally generated a lot of bad reviews on people using the service for backups which brings me to my next point. They were also known for bad support and have since introduced Support Force One to remedy their service issues promising a response in 24 hours, 7 days a week.
Do not use Livedrive as your only backup for your files. They have not yet perfected this from a security and reliability aspect. The tools are less reliable and the service and support around backups and restores are less than desired. This has also generated some bad press about the service in general as this is a niche they are trying to be in. If you do choose to use them for backing up your files, be sure to enable the SSL features to protect your data! This is not important for your music or video library.
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