SOS Online Backup for Windows

User Reviews

• Customer service is so poor, nothing else matters.

  March 8, 2016

  Pros

  Backup data slowly

  Cons

  Very poor customer service Will not answer emails Charges more than advertised price Loses their own emails

  Summary

  Don't touch this company. The more I read on the Internet, the worse it gets. I wish I had never subscribed.

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• ZERO STARS!

  November 3, 2015

  Pros

  This website is JUNK. I can't say it enough do not download it to your system or give them your credit card info.

  Cons

  They have AWFUL AWFUL customer service. Terrible privacy protection. Cannot ever answer the phone. Wouldn't back up any of my photos.

  Summary

  I have had an terrible experience with this online back up system. Very unorganized at least when it comes to the mac software. After failing repeatedly trying to get my files to backup i finally contacted customer service after being put on hold they told me they could not answer the phone and to use the chat system. THEN this chat guy asked me to download an illegitimate file from his file locker system. I of course did not do it. I finally decided i would just cancel my account. Well there is no way to cancel your account online!! You again have to go through the chat system. After two hours of trying to get it canceled and all of my files that did upload removed from their system the guy tells me that "it is not the end of the world and to be patient"!!! Awful customer service. I still have not received a refund. BOTTOM LINE do not use this website to protect all of your precious files.

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• SOS does not backup!

  galaxy12345May 23, 2014

  Pros

  None. Zero. Had the service for 30 days. It only worked for 5 of those days.

  Cons

  SOS software is not engineered correctly. The support staff has no clue how to solve any problem; and is unable to offer solutions. On top of that, SOS support contacts the customer when they feel like it. Product and support are terrible.

  Summary

  for one month, SOS told me all the troubles I was experiencing were on their end. Yet, they still could not fix the glitches on their end. This is a company that does not care about their own product. They do not care at all about customers. IMO, this is a rip-off company run by con-artists. The only time I was contacted quickly by SOS support, is when I requested a refund. SOS, begged me to keep their lousy software. No way. AVOID SOS ONLINE BACKUP. If you pay for SOS you will regret it.

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• Slow as molasses, not as sweet

  DCubed3March 2, 2014

  Pros

  It can handle multiple computers and it's relatively cheap. But you get what you pay for.

  Cons

  It's hard to say which is slower: the throttled download speeds you get with SOS, or the response time for customer-service inquiries regarding those speeds. After spending well over a week downloading less than 100GB of data, which stayed slow despite "account optimization" promised by a CSR, I asked SOS to cancel and give me a refund. They didn't respond for weeks. Finally, they cancelled my account. But they forgot about the refund, and have not responded to queries about it for weeks. You and your data will have drowned ten times before SOS comes to the rescue. Oh, one last thing - the service doesn't sync files, so when you download them, you get a bunch of junk you had previously deleted from your machine. Now that I'm back in the market, every other backup service I've looked at offers a syncing option.

  Summary

  You and your data will have drowned ten times before SOS comes to the rescue.<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Mar 4, 2014<p/>I sent this review to SOS and received a quick response from a new CSR, the third I had been working with. He immediately issued me a refund. My complaints about slow service had referred to two previous CSRs. I have learned the second one of these had been out sick, so cut them some slack for that. Still, the first CSR was unresponsive in the extreme.

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• Support is terribly lacking . . .

  mculloaFebruary 14, 2014

  Pros

  The service offers a reasonable number of possible options.

  Cons

  The support is so bad that when you need them for any reason at all it will take 24 - 48 hours before you can talk to a tech - no exceptions. This is not a one time occurrence, rather a consistent pattern for the last year, since the service was purchased by Infrascale.

  Summary

  The lack of technical support makes the service unusable. We have been a customer of SOS for some time and the remarkably consistently poor technical support leaves us and our customers stranded, so we have been actively looking to switch to a provider other than SOS.

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• Mixed experience...overall negative...

  mattjansDecember 2, 2013

  Pros

  1) Intuitive interface and backups seem to "work" most of the time 2) Generous with space limits (at least for smaller users like me) and with billing

  Cons

  1) Not for the "average user" who wants something you can set and forget 2) Online documentation is sparseand sometimes unclear 3) Online help is often quick, but also unclear and less than satisfying to me. 4) Backups don't accept illegal characters but they don't tell you that until you've backed-up files that you can't retrieve.

  Summary

  Ironically I moved from Mozy to this company b/c I felt like I couldn't get customer service from Mozy. I'm a home user with only a few machines backed up, and want something I can truly set and forget. I've ended up having to play too much "backup admin" with this company. Came to SOS based on rating on Cnet. For me the biggest requirement in backup is that once I specify what I want backed-up it just works. That includes giving me warnings if I'm doing something I shouldn't. I now get warnings for paths to long in my daily backup attempts, but it wasn't initially clear to me several years ago that I had to set that feature, so SOS was backing up a lot of files that it couldn't then restore to their original paths. I had a full crash and had to learn that the hard way. If they had better online documentation, that might be okay, but at the time there wasn't much to read to get started, so I just set it up and let it work. When I needed to restore I had to go rounds with their tech help to figure out what was going on b/c I'd see hundreds of errors in my restore. The only solution now is to go in and do restores folder-by-folder and then manually handle the ones that have paths too long in my original system. Also from that full crash, it looks like I will end up losing an unknown number of files that SOS can't back them up do to "illegal characters" in the names...I don't know why Windows would be OK with my character choices, but SOS wouldn't be (they're running on UNIX or something?). I've since done a little research on this and changed my file naming practices, but what a horrible way to have to learn, right! Overall, I think they need to do a better job catering to the average user and noob if they want to capture that market. I plan to move away from them when account billing cycle is next up. Any recommendations for easiest/simplest/clearest, and most user-friendly online backup for a few hundred GB?

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• Failed to Do Its One Job

  KairhoNovember 25, 2013

  Pros

  Support was excellent. Friendly, helpful, persistent. Unfortunately could not restore files which were definitely backed up as there was a three month gap in the backup even though we had logs of successful (supposedly) backup processes.

  Cons

  Two biggies which are disqualifying: 1. Could not restore files which were definitely backed up as there was a three month gap in the backup even though we had logs of successful (supposedly) backup processes. I paid over $150 for this FAIL? 2. Upload is sloooooow. Not going to post numbers but when a daily backup takes two days to accomplish (would have expected maybe 8-16 hours) something is wrong. Could live with this is such backups were not "lost" in the cloud.

  Summary

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• Tech Support and Sales Pitch Rolled in One

  Fred249September 26, 2013

  Pros

  Easy to download if you want to bother trying

  Cons

  Tech is horrible! Phone kept on getting disconnected, no answer, or asks you to leave message and never get back too you. Online Chat better but a pain to type and work on computer at same time, Sales reps speak very poor English. Argued with me rather than helped me!

  Summary

  I'm pretty proficient with a computer but found it difficult to configure for smallest number of files, as phone tech support was non-existent. Was called and told was over storage limit and then they wanted to sell me "special plan that would have cost more than $100 dollars.

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• Great until it's time to restore or share.

  alan_sternAugust 11, 2013

  Pros

  The software is easy to configure and use. Runs quietly in the background.

  Cons

  If you need to restore a file over 500 mb in size, you'll need to go to the software's "classic view" and manually select it. There's no way to restore it from the web. Likewise, due to "security reasons," it's not possible to share files over 500 mb. Both of these facts are important to prospective purchasers of the software, but they aren't included in the flimsy documentation or user's guide. Rather, they're only available to those who contact customer service wondering why they're having trouble with their large files.

  Summary

  If you don't ever foresee yourself restoring or sharing files over 500 mb in size, this is the backup for you. For everyone else, go somewhere else.

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• Fine when it works, but support has become lousy.

  HereNoEvilJuly 24, 2013

  Pros

  Easy to set up and use. Works quietly in background. Send reports WHEN IT'S WORKING RIGHT. My system has never crashed so I can't testify about file retrieval or restoration.

  Cons

  Service use to be OK, but now poor. No phone service at all. Most of the time, no immediate online chat service either. Instead, they punt you to email, and they're slow to respond to that. The response, when it comes, is (or at least was in my case) nonspecific, i.e., just from standard instructions, which hadn't been working. To be specific, 1 of the 3 computers on my household is not backing up reliably and is not, as it's set up to do, reporting its backups to the main household computer.

  Summary

  Good backup system, retrieval unknown, poor service.

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