Over the moon ( or shouild I say Cloud)

Having experienced dubious advice / shop service in the past from Currys / PC World, I approached their ‘Knowhow’ cloud storage service with a degree of apprehension, and for peace of mind before commitment, I opted for their 30 day free trial.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that even after day two of the trial, I was pretty much convinced to buy a ‘Knowhow Cloud’ plan,( I reckon the 5 year, 5 device, 2 TB plan, to be a bargain).

Before finding ‘Knowhow Cloud’, I looked at using the well known ‘Just cloud’. However, I only ever got near their headline price after clicking to leave their website several times and was only then, auto offered a series of so called special introductory discounts. If I want tricks I will book a magician and if I want to haggle down from a disingenuous start price ( Egyptian style), then I will visit a bazaar. Therefore, I felt wholly unable to trust them not to try to shaft me on price further on ( maybe at renewal time ?), So an early goal for ‘just cloud’, because of their slippery salesmanship.

My main thumbs up for ’Knowhow Cloud’, are quite simply , :
Reliability, Simplicity and Price.

Maybe corporate / multi professional users may need additional syncing features, but as a personal user with some sharing needs, this more than ticks all the boxes for me, as an affordable means of Secondary, Off Site back up, (in addition to the local external hard drives I use).

I noted some poor reviews of ‘Knowhow Cloud’, in the main, relating to very slow initial back up times and mine is taking an eternity too. However, a quick ‘Google’, showed this to be normal across most if not all cloud storage providers, and is a result of MY slow line speed. This is totally out of the control of knowhow ( so do be fair with the criticism). Once the initial full backup is complete, future incremental backups should / will be very quick indeed. Simple.

I like the simplicity & clarity of the control panel, the easy tick box tree structure to select which folders / files to back up, and that once set up, it will auto run in the background, either on demand, or at set intervals. It auto runs on PC start up. So basically set it up and forget it, end of.

I like the facility to recover / revert back to up to 20 previous versions of any particular backed up file and that any backed up files that are inadvertently deleted, are retained in the cloud for a further 30 day period to enable simple recovery of same.

I tried to confuse the system, by changing some of my account details mid way through a very large upload, but it simply paused the upload and continued where it had left off after I had entered the new amended account details.
I also whipped out the router power cable midway through an upload and sure enough it notified me of the blip, and then carried on where it had left off. So no worries at all here about unexpected power outages / interruptions etc.

The ability to share files via a cloud briefcase facility will be handy for me now and then, and may be of even more use to others with greater file sharing needs.

My chosen plan allows for backup of up to 5 devices within 1 account. with one master password controlling it all. I am sharing the account with / across 3 family member’s PCs, and I really want them to be responsible for their own backups.
However I am fearful that with access to the one and only master password, they could inadvertently alter of delete my files ( work related etc).

So, the ability to set sub passwords for access to each backed up PC / device would greatly allay my fears in this area. If you read this review Mr Knowhow, can you please add a sub password feature, but no big deal I guess if you can’t / don’t.

Final verdict : I think you could pay a whole lot more for this kind of service elsewhere, so GO FOR IT.