Huh⌠anyone use this?
I was wanting to get space like this that me and my exwife could store family photos on in a central location.
Could also back up my music and other media.
Lifetime subscription for an ongoing service? Company will never stay in business. Bad idea.
Plus, the reviews arenât great.
Back in August of last year, these same âgood guysâ offered unlimited lifetime back up for 85% off at $89.99. The company and offer were so sketchy that @beschizza conceded this:
And now itâs back, with the same exact BS quote that doesnât appear on the WSJ site:
[quote=âBoing Boing Store - SkyHub Cloudâ]
âOnline file storage excellence.â Wall Street Journal[/quote]
(I think it is funny that Rob says âStack Social handles our store supportâ and then gives a zen desk URL. Even Stack Social doesnât handle Stack Socialâs store support.)
Iâm starting to love these BB Store advertising entries. Theyâre almost art, in their own soul-selling way.
Perhaps weâll tell our children about them they way we recall those sketchy comic book ads with nostalgiaâŚ
Perhaps a bingo card would be appropriate?
- Last Chance
- Lifetime Subscription
- Wallet
- VPN
- Cloud Backup
- Online Course
- Certified
- Save
- 99% off
- 97% off
- 94% off
- 90% off
Have to include something about VPNs protecting you from hackers, viruses and data loss as well
Canât offer any advice re music etc, but flickr is still pretty good for sharing photos, especially if you want to easily control access and sharing.
Holy mixed metaphors Batman!
dang, that lifetime thing looks good and i could store all the video iâve acquired that i may watch someday. hmmm
the only problem is that the offer is good for 2 days only and i hate being rushed into the deal of the century when it may become the standard price next week.
So, âSkyhub Cloudâ is just a random Zoolz reseller. Zoolz brags that it provides âwhite labelâ service to resellers. For an extra $70 a month resellers get to use their own branding and web domain, and they can start selling online backups in 5 minutes.
Well, that doesnât sound so bad, a reseller backed up by a big organization with resources - except for one thing. It seems that when you pay for âlifetimeâ back up, you are paying the reseller (who pays Zoolz by the month) and not Zoolz. So, when that reseller stops paying Zoolz, poof, there goes your âlifetimeâ back up service. As one Skyhub Cloud customer says:
[quote]I had an online chat with Zoolz asking them what would happen to my backed-up data, and to my backup plan, should one of their resellers go out of business - specifically, would it still be available for restoration (and further backup) directly through Zoolz in a situation like that?
The answer was not encouraging: âYou will probably need to confirm it through them and know the policy that will of course inform you in order for you to retrieve your data ⌠we provide our customers [by which I think she meant âresellersâ] with the software excluding support of any type ⌠it will be mainly through the provider you choose to purchase from ⌠I would recommend you to copy your inquiry to SkyHub to receive an answer.â[/quote]
Notably absent from Skyhub Cloudâs website is any user agreement whatsoever specifying the terms, though the Master Agreement for resellers on the Zoolz website requires the reseller to get you to agree to the Zoolz end user agreement.
Fun facts: [quote] GENIE9 [Zoolz] shall have the right to terminate this Agreement at any time and for whatsoever reason upon providing Reseller with a 15 days written noticeâŚ
You [the reseller and their customers] will not have access to the data stored on AWS during a suspension or following terminationâŚ
Support. Unless you have made special arrangements, Genie9 will not provide support directly to your End Users, and you agree that you will not refer your End Users to Genie9 for direct support. [/quote]
Zoolz uses Amazon AWS, so Iâm not really sure how Skyhub is going to pay for 2 TB of Amazon AWS for a lifetime for $50 (more like $25 after they pay off Stack Social) and have any profit left over - I assume they are going to do what so many services do and overbook, hoping you wonât actually fill up a full 2 TB. On the other hand, Zoolz âhomeâ accounts are Amazon Glacier by default (low cost cold storage that takes 4 hours notice for access to become temporarily available - no streaming) - I canât tell from the sparse detail on the BB store listing if this is Glacier or not, but it seems more likely than not.
Either way, if you want to go cloud, sounds like you might be better off buying in higher up the food chain.
Iâm thinking maybe there are things you shouldnât by at rock bottom, 90% off discounts from some random dude: VPN service, surgery, brake repair, cloud back up serviceâŚ
DO NOT USE THIS.
Even though they deliver, it is a scam. Why have you never heard of this service outside these shady stacksocial stores? Because serious computer websites wonât even consider it.
I bought this, I know what Iâm talking about. Let me get straight to the point: To download something from your âstorageâ, you must WAIT FOR AT LEAST FOUR HOURS! And if youâre not available then, the download window will close again after a few hours. Live streaming? Forget it! And this is independent of the file size, I wanted to restore a one kilobyte text file.
They DO NOT OFFER SUPPORT. None of my emails was answered. NONE. And stacksocial will tell you to talk to the vendor. And the vendor wonât answer. This is what makes it a scam.
The service can only be used with a proprietary software. They promise encryption, but I havenât tested it yet. You CANNOT USE IT WITH BOXCRYPTOR.
This offer destroyed my trust in boingboingâs computer competence and in the offerings of the boingboing store.
Luckily, with the same purchase I bought a lifetime VPN subscription and they did deliver, even though for âonlyâ ten years with the promise to extend it for another ten years in 2026. That is still a bargain even at double the price (both offers were $49.99).
âThis offer destroyed my trust in boingboingâs computer competence and in the offerings of the boingboing store.â
Indeed, this is exactly not the kind of thing I expect from boingboing. So far as I can see, this service doesnât even support Linux. Hello, what?
Zoolz, the back end âSkyhubâ (aka, some dude with a Zoolz reseller account) is using, claims zero knowledge about usersâ data; however, that doesnât apply when it comes to overzealous copyright enforcement:
Zoolz wouldnât let Gallagher recover any of his 1.3TB of back up data because he had some .torrent files in his back up - just the pointer files, not any actual copyrighted content. They said they couldnât separate them out, so they destroyed all of his data.
But, donât worry, their nuclear option-level concern over copyright only applies to âhomeâ accounts (like the one in BB Store). If you pay them more money, suddenly they donât care anymore.
Oh, and what is âabuseâ? Having more than a half a TB of media files. From the terms of service for Zoolz:
Got that? If more than 1/4 of your fully paid, $50 for âlifeâ 2 TB account is media files, youâll need to upgrade to a âbusinessâ account. (What besides media files, with their large files sizes, would a home user need a 2 TB back up account for???)
This is definitely a scam. no one should buy this. Here is a thread from August where bitter boing boing users complained and figured out how to get their money back. Cmon @beschizza what can you do about this? I already contacted stack commerce support telling them it needs to not be offered. Anyway, hereâs the link to the other discussion:
[quote=âboingboing, post:1, topic:74719â]Some bad guys steal your lunch money. Some rob banks, others use guns and swords or blow things up.[/quote]And some offer products and services of dubious merit at a deceptively high discount, amirite?
I agree with the Flickr idea here, thereâs a lot of control that you can share with another user and itâs main thing is hosting photos, which it does really, really well.
So, Boing Boing. How about replying to these comments, dudes. You ARE attaching your name to this serviceâŚ
