AVG Technologies LiveKive review

AVG is best known for its antivirus software, but the company has now launched its own online storage service called LiveKive. It looks eerily familiar since it’s actually a rebranded version of SpiderOak with better value pricing.

The more you pay, the more storage you get. 2GB is available for free, while 25GB costs £35 a year and unlimited storage (subject to a publicly viewable fair usage policy) is available for £55 a year. You’ll need a fast broadband upload speed to make the most of the unlimited plan, though.

Once you’ve installed the program on your PC or Mac, you can pick and choose which files you’d like to back up. The Basic mode allows you to back up all of your Documents, Music and/or Photos, including any files on your desktop. The Advanced mode is more sensible since it lets you pick specific files to back up, although the interface for doing so is tedious to use. You can only view your hard disk in a tree view and the accuracy of finding files by keyword search is hit-and-miss. Unfortunately, you can’t simply drag and drop files from Windows Explorer into the LiveKive app to back them up.

The backup process itself works smoothly. Files can be backed up automatically or at set intervals. You can exclude files larger than a certain size, of a certain age or certain file types from being backed up to make the most of your online storage. You can also choose to keep a local copy of your backup on an external hard disk or NAS. There’s no way of manually throttling the amount of bandwidth used if you need your internet connection for other tasks, other than simply pausing all uploads. We didn’t have any trouble restoring our files though.