Complaint Review: JustCloud

My experience with this company has been horrific.  I signed up for an unlimited cloud promotion which sounded great.  Not exactly too good to be true, since most new companies in a congested field offer loss leaders as an enticement.  This company offered auto back-up for a low price, and because I had had a recent enough data scare, I was happy to take it.

So, I noticed things about the GUI that I thought were lame, particularly the inability to search for files by file name or other attributes.  But, hey, it's cheap and at least my files were all there, somewhere, if I needed them.

Fast forward 8 months to end of 1/14 and my Lenovo started to do whacky things.  I wasn't sure if it was an impending HD failure or something else, so I thought that I would try the obvious - a restore.  As you may know, a restore will completely reset the HD and sometimes fixes problems.  I had one file, in particular, into which I had literally put 100s of hours and which was over 10GB.  You bet that I checked JustCloud to make sure that sucker was there.  However, because I couldn't get my computer to stay on (pretty sure it's a contact/electric problem), I had to check from my phone, which gave me a different display than usual.  No problem!!  It was there, bold as life.  Always cautious on this front, I even ran another manual back-up.  Then I did the restore.  It didn't fix it.  Sigh.

When I got my new laptop, I downloaded my files, and that one in particular.  However, I started to notice that this file didn't have any updates since 6/13.  I looked at the file and then also noticed that it was only 7GB.  Weird.  I just figured that something had gone amiss with the download and did it again.  Same thing.  Then I looked more closely at the file on JustCloud....it was dated 6/13, when I initially signed up for the service and I guess it did a true back-up.  

Oh My God.  You cannot imagine the catastrophe that this was.  It compromised evidence in 3 cases, not to mention my time.  What's worse is that I could have easily done a back-up to an external drive of this file, had I realized that JustCloud was completely unreliable.  

Come to find out, there's a "small print" caveat with the service.  Yes, your storage is unlimited - so long as your files are less than 1GB.  Otherwise, you have to upgrade, and even then, it only covers files up to 5GB.  So, in essence, the files which represent the biggest data and input losses are completely uncovered.  This is buried in the settings - which I had no reason to worry about, since what reasonable person would expect that an unlimited, paid service would limit file size?  I can upload a 10GB file to Google Drive for free!!  Likewise, having seen the file name in the directory, it never occurred to me that I would have to check the *date* it's actually worse that it ever back-up the file at all, because at least then I would have been alerted to a problem instead of lured into a false sense of security.

Worse, they had nothing to say about it besides, Oh, well.  You should have upgraded.  Well, no.  That actually wouldn't have solved my problem.  They didn't even offer to refund the fee I've paid.  I am investigating to see if there is a damages suit in this, but in the meantime, if you have any intention of using this service, don't bother.  If you have to do a manual back-up to ensure that you have a back-up, what's the point of having JustCloud?