Evault is a Seagate company according to their website. Since I prefer Seagate hard drives, that gave them a big advantage in my search for a replacement of Mozy’s cloud backup services.

Let me point straight out, I have no problems with Mozy’s services or backup and retrieval program. I was only looking because I feel it is past time for Mozy to drop their rates. As a “dealer” or whatever they called my company, we received discounts but had to purchase a monthly minimum of an assortment of backup software and storage. The minimum was a lot of money with the new recession in full bloom. The need for less storage, the need for reduced pricing and the loss of some customers put me in a bad spot. Basically it broke down to costing me $6.95 per month per computer and 42 to 50 cents, a gigabyte a month. With other cloud backup services advertising much lower rates my search began.

As you could tell by my title, I have been extremely underwhelmed with Evault. My adventures with them began on May 30th of this year. They were (and may still be) offering 100 GB of free storage. There are conditions to that, it is 10GB for 10 machines. Ok, misleading advertising, strike one. Next I downloaded their software and setup portal account and my laptop backup. The next day I tried to download the software and setup the second computer.

Two months later I was setup, yes, you read right two months later. Emails, phone calls, following their directions, reset passwords, what a cluster.

Their customer service took 4 to 10 business days to respond to emails, if they responded at all. To me that is not customer service, strike two, three and thirteen. This was with every email inquiry. The how to and installation directions on the web site were not intuitive. Please remember I have been a “computer guy” since 1984. The emailed PDF was no better and the links were all incorrect. Sigh!

During this time I received 4 or 5 calls from Evault representatives. Not to resolve my problem but to sell me more storage. Each time I expressed my concern over the issue of not being able to get another machine setup up and each time it ended with “we will have someone contact you”. Fail! I did try to call the contact number from the web site, the phone rings and that is about all. Every time I called I hung up after 10 minutes of not getting a person. It is beyond wrong to leave customers on hold that long, actually longer since I hung up. Ten minutes is all you get Evault, take note, customers do care about their time.

Finally I told one of the sales slime I was an IT guy and would be interested in reselling Evault, that is why I was testing it, but at this time only could give it a failing recommendation. Within five minutes of getting off the phone some other sales slime called and wanted to setup a time for an online demo. I setup the time figuring I would give them a lecture if I could.

They called on the appointed day and time. We started the demo with a failed connection to their machine, they resolved that quickly. I did cut them short on the sales pitch and told them of my issue getting the 2nd machine going, they wanted to remote in, not a chance. A little while later with a link to reset the password I was in after resetting a password that I already knew was right. Later I found out after looking at the link text it was the https:// part of the link that made all the difference.
Finally 2nd computer gets setup!

Once setup they went to their sales pitch, I asked how much, their attitude was if you have to ask then you cannot afford it and “just sign up”. Really?! Abruptly I told them they had to beat Mozy by no less than 50%, they were aghast, in their opinion Mozy was no good and there was no comparison. When I asked how they were better and insisted on specific ways and examples, they had none. Then they told me if I was only shopping I price they were not the company for me. I asked and they confirmed, they are more expensive than Mozy. Do you see a common thread here? Well that was enough for me, I went straight for the jugular, giving them the exact facts, dates email addresses et al with their crappy service. Not surprising the sales slime who wanted me to purchase a minimum of $250 a month was rather quick to get off the phone.

I waited a couple of months because I wanted to setup my daughter’s computer to backup. I waited because I wanted to do a reinstall on her machine first. After the reinstall I began the process of installing and configuring Evault again, this time I received two email replies with the usual delay and then no more replies to my questions of how to get on my portal. Hello! Evault, are you a business or not?

I spent some time off and on trying to figure why the password reset, sent from my earlier call, was the only link that worked. That is when I figured out why I could not access my “portal” all the links in their documents and emails to me were http:// it needed to be https:// WOW! Was that it! Yup!

So I logged on to setup my daughter’s computer. Now that I was in my portal, where is / was that pesky software download button? Oh, yeah, there is not one! You have to go to another location on their web site, outside your portal to get the link. In the portal you can get the “key” for activation but not the software.

So Evault, here is a question or two for you. Who do you have building this web site? Writing your documents? Verifying your emails? Checking up on your sales slime? Are you really just riding on your reputation of Seagate?

Once I created the “key” and found the download, I installed and configured the backup. After watching the backup for a couple of days I was defiantly not getting the number of files I was expecting. Here is where I admit my fault. There are two sections on the menu, in the program that installs on your computer, “Choose from these file types at these locations” and below that is “Exclude these file types at these locations”. In my haste or maybe because I expected Evault to fail, I selected file types in both areas, basically countering out most of the backup. After I realized what I had done I fixed it.

It was only then I noticed something I had not paid attention to prior, how slow the uploads to the backup are. I am getting 77 to 88 KB per machine. Before you jump on a network issue, remember, I may not be the smartest guy, but I do know what I know. Going to my Zoolz test machine I checked. I was getting 1.39 to 1.95Mbps at the same time. To be fair, I shut all systems off on my network except one computer using Evault. There was the same crappy upload speeds. I then shut that machine off and turned on and ran the Zoolz test machine. Same numbers from it 1.39 to 1.95. Evault is just slow as molasses in January.

At this point you might be asking why I even put the Evault program on a 3rd PC. As with all testing done here for The Weekly Geek, I really put things through their paces, no five minute test, only actual, real world use, so I felt I should continue on.

In conclusion I would like to go over the Pros and Cons of Evault.

The Pros: You get 10 accounts that can hold up to 10GB each, great for home computers / systems. It works with PC’s and Mac’s and you can mix and match the devices. They use (gosh I hope) Seagate hard drives.

The Con’s: Once you have created an account, the portal is not intuitive or user friendly. There is no access for the software download from the portal. They don’t answer their phone when you have issues. About 25% of the time emails were not responded to. Email responses that were received took 3 to 10 business days and the question sent to them was never answered, they would reply with a non-related question. The times I was able to talk to someone on the phone (sales people calling me) they were not customer friendly. Thus I must conclude overall they have poor tech support. They are more expensive than Mozy and Mozy is already on the high end of cloud / off-site backup. The backup speeds to their servers are horridly slow.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!