KeepIt Online Backup Review
Overall Rating
With Keepit, you have an example of a firm and service that does exactly what it purports to do; it’s reliable; it’s predictable; and it’s straight forward. No fluff here, nothing ambiguous about what the firm’s offering or going after. They’re a backup service, pure and simple. They’re not going to muddy up this competency with a plethora of half baked share features, or blogging or other web 2.0 type features. No gimmicks, just the backup service. And that’s what we liked about this offering.
What we didn’t like, though, was the fact that there wasn’t as much as an email share sort of feature, where we can invite friends with an email address to view directory of photos we had backed up to the Keepit cloud.
But the clenching disappointment really had to be the completely inadequate support content. Through our testing of the service, we didn’t really feel the need to actually inquire about a real technical issue, but we did poke around the site a bit to try to find a forum or something, a user supported knowledge base or something, but really couldn’t find very much more than the FAQ, which was only 10 points long.
Ultimately, we were left wondering if the service was comprised of a couple of college kids that liked to drink beer, and new a thing or two about reselling cloud resources. If anything, well drawn out support content and support facilities is just a matter of plain old professionalism.
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Features
Configuring Keepit to backup was simple enough; you basically download the 11 MB msi file for Windows (there’s also a client for the Mac, but we didn’t test it), and then the desktop app walks you through the very straight forward process of setting up the backup process.
Just as a side note, there’s this cute little feature that the desktop app does: it integrates announcements of the latest blog posts into the header of the app. We found this helpful, and the entries posted there were actually pretty interesting, pretty useful.
So, you configure your backups, set the schedule and then basically let the utility run on its own. By default, Keepit checks off the usual directories on Windows, such as Documents, Pictures, Desktop, etc. But you can select whatever you folder you want to keep backed up to the cloud. It’s all up to you. Like any other of these online storage and backup services, Keepit uses proprietary compression methods and encryption to help keep all the activity between your computers and the Keepit cloud, safe, secure and fast.
As soon as you’ve configured your backup schemes, then Keepit sets out about transferring those files up to the Keepit cloud, where you’ll be able to access your restoration files whenever you need.
Keepit prides itself on security, stability and speed, and boasts of a number of hardware and software innovations on its website that keeps the quality of its services suite at the upper echelon of what’s readily available to consumers. But overall, what we found was that the service was sort of no frills, no nonsense; it did what it purported to do, which was simply to backup your data, and nothing really more or less than that. No breakthroughs here, in other words. But it does do what it says it can do.
One of the main criticisms that we have about online backup solutions is that they slow systems down to a crawl whenever we start backing up. But we didn’t find this to be the case with Keepit, thankfully. After installing and commencing the backup procedures, our systems that tested the Windows client didn’t experience any noticeable degradation in application speed or application experience, whatsoever.
Of course, the backup progress completely depended on our connection, and we submit to that. We got our docs of about 500 MB backed up in about 30 minutes off of a typical residential coax cable connection to the internet. So: no red flags, but nothing shockingly extraordinary here either. Again, Keepit does what it says it can do.
The application itself we found to work just as advertised. And it all was really self explanatory, as we weren’t left with any unanswered questions or even had any questions about what else can be done about the service.
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File Sharing
A bit of a disappointment in this area, most online storage and backup services will feature a minor capability to share things over social networking sites, or even to email recipients. But this was completely lacking in this service. Keepit is “keeping” with the backup line of services solely and apparently exclusively. There aren’t any plans, as far as we can tell, for the company to provide anything more than the backup line of services.
Support
Support was lacking as well, actually. It was one of the things that we felt might have needed to be filled in, filled out a bit more, but support here was actually inadequate. In fact, you won’t find the word “support” on any of the front pages of the Keepit website; instead, you’ll have a help link, which actually just links over to the FAQ.
And thought the FAQ is pretty good, it’s pretty much all you really have in the way of support with the company. You have a general contact page, where you can send an email over to customer service, and you have an office address, as well as a toll free hotline that you can call up. But we were actually pretty unclear about whether those were sales lines or support lines.
The email form on the customer service page says, “We aim to answer you within 24 hours,” which we found sort of ambiguous. Was that time stipulation there because the form was meant to be used as a tech support trouble ticket form, or was it a sales inquiry form? It just wasn’t at all clear. And again, why did “Help” just link to the FAQ? We really didn’t get that.
Price
Keepit is selling two lines of backup services. One is geared toward the private home user, while the other is geared to the “more demanding user, who uses multiple computers and has special storage space needs.”
The webpage on the prices is very clear cut, and the takeaway is this: the home service costs $4/month, and the Pro service costs $3 per PC/month. There are a few things that were awfully ambiguous however. We’ll list them:
• Why is “GB space” unlimited for the home user, but “optional” for the business user? What do they mean by GB space being “optional?”
• And, what’s the point of listing the $0.00/GB rate again?
• And for the home user, they list the number of pictures and music files that are allowed to be backed up as being “unlimited,” but for the business user, this is “variable?”
There aren’t any footnotes or anything that clears any of this up. In fact, the phrasing of “perquisites” is just sort of awkward (“None, other than payment on time”). The service works fine, but these little things just rubbed us the wrong way. Make of it what you will.
If you are a Keepit user please feel free to leave your own review, comments and ratings below for others to see. That way people don’t have to take our word for it.
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