Tried DataSafe for most of the free trial period, configured it, and it claims to run at the most inopportune of times. It was supposed to have backed up my documents and email, but ye know what? Of the 2GB of size, and having it run over a year's time, I have 2.00GB free of 2.00GB. That means it has not backed up a thing, ever!

Uninstall is your friend.

37 years? It doesn't seem right to say, but I am relieved it isn't just me. We bought a new Dell laptop, Studio with Vista & 64 bit CPU a few weeks ago. Data safe is on it. The instructions were to set it up and back up the hard drive, so dumb us, we tried. It wouldn't back up anything, took forever to finally fail -- just two hours -- and wouldn't close. I did a search and found out people have been having all kinds of problems with it. We're going to try to un install it, but some people reported they couldn't get rid of it. Thanks, Michael Dell. America needs adults who aren't so frustrated by preventable computer problems that they don't have the time or energy to fix other things.  You gave us Data Safe. Nice work.

I can't say that I love DataSafe, but I will say that it just saved me from losing a lot of data. A year ago, my hard drive in my Inspiron laptop suffered a miserable failure. My husband and I also have many years of computer experience, and this drive was bad and getting worse with everything we tried to access it . Desperate for the data I did send it out to a recovery lab (to the tune of $1000) and they got most all the data off (some files here and there were corrupted), but I got back what I needed. Never to have that happen again, I installed Data Safe, since it was on the laptop and I hadn't used it. As a photographer, I have lots of picture files, which are large, so I signed up for 50GB of backup storage. And over the last year, it backed up (inconsistently) my system and I was up to 38GB of backed up data since last June. And then it happened again. Two weeks ago the drive just went away. No operating system was found..blah blah.. I nearly panicked but then I went to see when the last back up ran..and it was actually pretty current. I was saved. So I kicked off a recover of all my data (from another computer) and it said it would take 12 hours, after all it was 38GB....28 hours later it was still at 24%...so I finally killed it. And this time I chose a lot less data to recover at one time. The max time chunk I ever ran was just over 3 hours, and it didn't fail, but mostly I kept it to within an hour and a half at a time. Doing it this way I was able to get everything I needed back. It was tedious to have to keep going back and selecting the files I needed, but the good news was that I got them. And now I am going to burn them all onto a DVD...so I was out searching the boards for a manner in which to delete the 38GB of data that I no longer want saved on some remote server, so I can start back ups again with nothing out there. So far, what I have read is that (1)-You can't tell the tool to delete them and (2)-Maybe if I select other areas to backup, these older files will just go away...we'll see. I did just renew my subscription, because it did just save me, but it is not a robust tool at all. My backups often did not run successfully (typically when large new amounts of data needed backing up) and rather than it backing up nightly as scheduled, it was generally successful only 1-2 times a week. I'd love to see Dell improve this tool, because it is very useful and would be better if it just behaved as expected.

I too am having no luck with this program which I paid for after the free 1 year initial period ended. Because of a problem with a windows update, I had to restore my laptop to its' factory condition. I felt safe because I had data safe. After numerous attempts and even tech support help, kind of, it not only didn't work, but whatever files I saw on the website data safe portal, were now gone. I counted on this to protect my files, and now it appears I'm out of luck. Customer service is non existent for this product. I'm a very unhappy user.

The backup runs every week and on the "DataSafe Web Portal" home tab, it shows that my last backup was successful and that 740 files are protected.  However, when I go into the web port under the "Access Files" tab, I don't see any files.  How do i get them to appear?

That happened to me the first time I wanted to restore. I tried the whole weekend and couldn't see the list of files, but it still said they were backed up. When I tried the following Monday, I finally got a list and could choose.  So keep trying to get back on to see if the list will show up - eventually it will. And when they did, I mistakenly I tried to do a full restore - don't. Choose small batches at a time and you'll succeed, but too much and it starts fine then just sits forever and you have to kill it and start over.

I can't get it to work at all - even for small files

I can't get my files to restore at all.  I tried all files - nothing. I tried fewer files - I do get the email that they are there.  So - I go into Accessed Files and I get an error message that says, among other things - Server Timed Out.

I try "Download All" another time - and the webpage closes and it says "not found"

Yes, I have gotten it to work and it has saved me from losing stuff...but it wasn't easy and I had to fight with it to restore - kept choking on large requests. It shouldn't be that difficult for it to work properly - and it is sad because in theory it is very useful. Perhaps there is something else that is more robust that is better. For now, since I am too lazy to search, I'm still using it.

I gather from what I read here many have the same a problem and Dell is not taking care of business.  This is merely one example why Dell is constantly in court being sued for denial of services or breach of contract.  It also seems they simply do not care.  I took datasafe out of my computer, it is worthless junk that does nothing but give error messages, so I removed it all, why bother and waste your time with something that refuses to work or work correctly, it is just taking up space.  I am going to get a different backup software.

There is no sense calling tech support or agruing with them, that also is useless and a waste of time.  It is a miracle to me that Dell is able to stay in business with this kind of attitude.  I wonder, has anyone actually got Dell datasafe to work and work correctly?  My next computer shall not be a Dell you can be ever so sure of that!