UPDATE: LiveDrive who ran the servers that Backify leased as resellers have just sent a warning letter to users that basically tells them not to give any credit card details to Backify and to cancel any cards that have been used with the company.

“We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure.”

I suppose it was always going to be too good to be true, but Backify the cloud storage service that offered early adopters 500 gigabytes of online storage space free to users, just sent an email asking them to update their “billing details”.

As of 22nd November all free accounts will be closed, unless you pay up. No explanation, no excuses, no apology. Just for clarity, as far as I know there was absolutely no mention of the free 500Gb being part of a trial or temporary. B*st*rds. All that backing up time and effort wasted and for nought. They will not get a dime out of me. I have the encrypted data on there backed up redundantly in DropBox and on Box.net and on my USB hard drives.

From the start, I couldn’t quite figure out how they planned to make any money, but had assumed that the generation of so much goodwill among bloggers and others who took up the free offer, might draw in enough paying customers to cover their costs, that and the fee for using their paid-for BriefCase tool to accompany one’s free account. Obviously not.