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Zip Cloud / My PC Backup are Scammers!

At the prodding of a buddy of mine over the winter I signed up for an online backup service called Zip Cloud. It’s an online backup service which basically takes a copy of all your files and places them online. If your computer ever crashes you simply download all your files onto a new computer. Pretty novel concept, eh? I’ve been using online backup with Dropbox for quite a few years now.

There are lots of services out there that specialize in online backup. I personally use Dropbox, which isn’t truly an online backup service in the traditional sense but serves my purposes well. I pay $10/mo for 50GB of space and unlimited computers.

Zip Cloud offers “unlimited backup” space for $4.95/mo which sounds great until you actually sign up. The red flag was they tried to squeeze you into yearly billing. So $4.95/mo becomes $60 if you’re not careful, more on this later.

First off, you can pay quite a bit extra per month for “unlimited upload speed”. This is probably the most scammy upsell. The speed of your backup is determined by the the upload speed of your internet connection. For the most part, upload speed  is abysmal in the US. You would essentially be paying extra to remove an artificial limit placed on your account by Zip Cloud and still be waiting days for your backup to complete. My guess is support would blame your internet connection after taking the extra money.

Instantaneous backups? Yup, that’s a monthly upsell too. Every reputable service offers instantaneous backups of your files even with the introductory or free plans. What use is a backup that’s days old? Every additional computer to be backed up or sync’ed also incurred another monthly fee.

ZipCloud / My PC Backup is nickel and diming their customers. Generally, I’m okay with the upsells or “freemium” business model. However, scamming people with nonsense upsells is not okay. The ‘unlimited upload speed’ package is what turned me off right away. It’s a pity that you don’t see all this nickel and diming before you sign up.

Once I seen what was going on  I went to cancel and here are screen caps of the cancellation process.

Remember that yearly billing squeeze I mentioned earlier? Look the first option of cancellation:

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing on with an offer of 20% off:

 

 

 

 

 

No, okay how about 50% off?

 

 

 

 

You really want to leave? Well okay but would you stay with us to the end of your billing period so we can keep your money?

 

 

 

 

 

Zip Cloud seems  pretty desperate, don’t they? Stick with reputable services like Dropbox, Mozy, and Carbonite. Skip scammers like Zip Clound / My Backup PC.

Tags: internet connectiononline backup servicereputable services
Dan The Man:

View Comments (27)

  • Hi there, I was reading your review and I actually thought you where talking about Justcloud, it seems they are all the same. Actually their websites look exactly the same. I felt totally missed leaded with their offer and after paying an 2 year subscription I found out that I had to pay extra for additional computers and for sharing. Also I was insistently offered an upgrade to increase backup speed. I am sick of this companies that work deceiving people.

    • MyPCBack up,Justcloud, zipcload is the same company. I just want to differ a with the original poster. I've been working with justcloud and had no trouble at all. However, as Lori said, the problem comes when it comes to cancel your account. Many people have experienced problems with this, I have read about the same on different blogs.

  • ZipCloud and JustCloud are the same company and are indeed scammers. Since you posted this post, they made the cancellation process even more difficult. I signed up for one month of their service, just to test it, and it was not supposed to be recurring a subscription. Before my one-month subscription ended, I decided not to use this service any more and to cancel my account. The only way to do so is now to send an email to a specific email address.

  • ZipCloud and JustCloud are the same company and are indeed scammers. Since you posted this article, they made the cancellation process even more difficult. I signed up for one month of their service, just to test it, and it was not supposed to be recurring a subscription. Before my one-month subscription ended, I decided not to use their services anymore and to cancel my account. I found out that the only way to do so is now to send an email to a specific email address. So, I sent my cancellation email, and I have now received two emails asking if I really want to cancel. Each time I have replied that yes, I really want to cancel, but they just won't do it... The best part? I just realized that they charged another 1-month payment on my bank account, which I didn't authorize, and they did so 6 days before my 1-month subscription was supposed to end. Do not sign up with ZipCloud or JustCloud; you will regret it.

  • I agree with all other posters - ZipCloud appear to be fraudsters. Their "30 Day Money Back Guarantee" is a fake. You will never see your refund. If you are UK resident, there is no legal entity in the country against which you can take legal action to recover your money. Do not even think about using ZipCloud services - it all ends in tears.

  • Ha.

    I have paid a monthly subscription, then realized their service sucks, then tried to cancel my account. Result? Infinite chain of back-and-forth emails between me and their "support".

    My advice: do not use them.

    Sad enough, The reason for me to try their service was a recommendation I found on some website, close to the top of Google search results.

    • With their business practices I wouldn't doubt if you read a self-written recommendation. It's also worth nothing that they pay very high affiliate commission so less than honest affiliate marketers will write favorable reviews just to get you to click through and buy a subscription through their link.

  • I want to follow up on this outfit...do any of these people report and get their maney back? If so, who did they contact and did they get any help to gat it back?

    Lori

  • I am a ZipCloud subscriber, and so far so good. I do not share the feelings expressed here. Optional upsells are just that: optional. I took none, and all my devices are backing up happily. I have not had the opportunity to restore from a data loss event yet, and hopefully I am not going to any time soon. Everything (else) seems to work ok. I am still going to keep DropBox obviously, but AFAICS, I am keep ZipCloud too.

    • I sure hope that you wont have to restore from ZipCloud - I have lost literally hundreds of picture files - that seemed to be backed up but when I try to restore I get 0 bytes. And what did I get from Zip Cloud? A 'sorry for the inconvenience'

  • Well I am just going to tell my story in order to help others with their decision. First of all I was using rapidshare and RapidDrive as a cloud backup service and recently they changed their unlimited plan to a 250Gb plan. So I started looking around for alternatives. After searching and reading and because of the high scores that I was seeing for ZipCloud I thought to give them a try. The advertise unlimited space (which is not entirely true). So the first disappointment came when I started an account and then saw that I had to pay for "supercharging" my account to be able to upload more than 1GB file size or to have unlimited space. At the moment I have already paid for a six month period 41 Euro. You see I was pretty sure that I have found the alternative that I was looking for. I was wrong. In another user review in another site I read that he was using JustCloud (the same company) and he couldn't restore an edited document. So I made the experiment myself and guess what. They failed. I downloaded a doc file with some text. Then made some text changes and sync again. The new updated file seemed to be uploaded OK. BUT when I was trying to restore I was able to restore only the initial backup and not the next versions. In addition whenever I was running an application ESET Nod32 firewall detected communication between the app (which was hooked apparently to some ZipCloud dll) with some mypcbackup server (same company different name again). After using their service for not more than a week I asked a refund and a cancellation. After about 3-4 mails and another week time today 5th April 2013 I managed to cancel my account and get back 26.6 Euro. They are keeping 14.95 as early termination fees. So at the end. I have lost about two weeks of my time and 15 euro. At the moment I am testing another company called CrashPlan and it seems to be doing much better. So from my point of view....stay away from ZipCloud, JustCloud MyPCBackup and any other affiliate company.

  • Hey all..

    Just a quick post:

    if you enter on Mybackupc and Justcloud, and close the windows, both the sites try to connect with an agent and do you a pop-up offer of a 14 day free trial dial...

    another thing is that on Google Play, Both - Justcloud and Zipcloud has the SAME interface and pictures and examples, etc... what the odds? unless they hire the same company to develop the app, but in a very competitive business like this growing and giants like Google and Microsft playing the game, i dont think so...

    - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jdibackup.android.justcloud
    - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jdibackup.android.zipcloud#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIxMiwiY29tLmpkaWJhY2t1cC5hbmRyb2lkLnppcGNsb3VkIl0.

    Regards from brazil

  • Hi guys, confirmed, the following are the same companies and all CR@P

    - JustCloud
    - MyPCBackup
    - ZipCloud
    - BackupGenie

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