Backify Gives 512GB Of Online Backup Storage For Free

A new service called Backify is offering an insane 512GB of online storage for free just for signing up for their service. It’s the definition of freemium, with two additional tiers of unlimited backup and unlimited backup + “briefcase”, which is space you can use for anything, coming in at $US3 and $US5 a month, respectively.

This amount of space for free sounds amazing, especially since they let you download software onto your computer to automatically take care of backups for you, thereby minimising the amount of ads you would have to look at (for them to recoup bandwidth and storage costs). That is, if that’s even how they monetise the service. But there are some red flags.

One, the enormous amount of storage given is a red flag in itself.

Two, your password that you set is sent to you in plain text. We called the service and they said the passwords only come in plain text in the email right now, and are stored MD5 hashed. They are going to fix the plain-text email thing later today.

Three, although we were able to get through to the company, from what we heard it sounds more like a start-up, low-scale operation than a properly established business. That may or may not be true — this is just the impression we got from calling them.

In any rate, from a quick search, there isn’t a lot of mention of Backify before today; so little so that Google automatically assumes I mean Backupify, which got $US5 million in Series B funding earlier this year.

512GB is a lot to turn down, so what I would recommend is to sign up with an email address you don’t much care about, with a password that isn’t used anywhere else, in case there’s any risk of security breach down the line.

Backify [via Tom's Hardware]