Despite the problems I’d had with Mozy, I kept using them because I was lazy and never got around to switching to a better service.  They were taking their monthly payment out of Paypal, but when that account got depleted they notified me I needed to give them a different card to continue using their service.

I’m leaving town in a few days and didn’t want to mess with finding another service. I figured I’d just give them a different card for now, then replace them when I got around to it, which would probably be never, because I’m still lazy.

I went to their site, entered a different card and received a cryptic error message about a portal error.  I was instructed to contact support.  Heh.

I clicked on support, and selected the chat option.  Nothing happened. So I called their phone number, which wasn’t easy to find, and was asked to put in my client number, which was displayed on the web page as all zeros.  It didn’t work.

The e-mails telling me my account was about to expire came from  support@mozy.com, so I replied to that address and said if they gave me a call within the next 24 hours I’d renew.  I got an auto-reply saying no one read e-mail from that address.  Silly me, thinking I’d get help from a Mozy mailbox named support.

I couldn’t put it off any longer – I had to go shopping.  A friend on Facebook suggested myotherdrive.com, and it looked good, so I rather foolishly blew past their free sample offer and signed up for a paid account.

I found the software fairly confusing and non-intuitive, but would have figured it out if it weren’t for the error messages that kept popping up.  No problem, I thought, I’ll just call their support line.

There was no phone number.  There was no online chat.  There was nothing but a form to fill out to send them an e-mail.  I filled it out, asking them to cancel my account and issue me a refund.

I continued my search.  If a service got good reviews I checked it out and looked for support links.  Most offered nothing but an e-mail form, and they were often hard to find.

After rejecting a half dozen services, simply because they had no live support, I visited iDrive, and was happy to see they had a phone number prominently displayed.  But phone numbers don’t mean anything if no one ever answers them, so I gave them a call.

There was no robo-voice pretending to carry on a conversation; no list of nine different options, described in great detail, with the one I wanted at the end. I was given the choice to press 2 for sales, 3 for technical support or 4 for billing. Nice.  Simple.  I pressed 2, then wrote down the time, intending to see how long it took to get to a human.  As I set down my pen a woman answered “Hello, iDrive technical support, can I help you?”  As an added bonus she was American.

After a quick test of their client software (which was straightforward and intuitive) I became a paying customer.

I’m a computer geek and can usually figure things out on my own.  But when I can’t I expect fast, competent support.  (As an ex-support guy myself, I have pretty high expectations from support people.)  Even though I seldom use it, support is a major factor in deciding who gets my money.  Mozy, you didn’t lose me because of your clumsy software and lousy restore process. You lost me because your support is non-existent, even when my question was “how can I pay you money?” iDrive, you got my business because you answered my call in a few seconds.  (I would have been happy if it had taken four or five minutes.)  You had me at Hello.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Speaking of support, it’s been a while since I reiterated how much Startlogic sucks.  They really, really suck.  Just in case you were wondering.