So imagine my amusement – or should that be ‘bemusement’ – when I received a telephone call this morning to arrange for collection of Star’s “PC backup equipment” from our premises. What equipment? It’s an online service, you idiots! Maybe they were intending to come and collect the Internet from our office…

The benefit to us was that it offered us (as early adopters) unlimited storage of backups of our data. We didn’t take the piss by backing up GBs of music files, etc. But all our data and archives, some 18GB or so, are backed up daily and incrementally.

Until today…

Netstore passed on the provision of the service to Star Technology Services Limited a few years ago and we continued to be billed by Star for the online backup facility.

Late last year, we received an e-mail from David Palmer, the Product Manager at Star, which said:

“Early next year Star will be launching a brand new and improved PC Backup service designed to meet the increased demands of our business customers. These improvements will make your online back-ups and restores easier and faster than ever – providing even better protection against data loss, corruption and theft.” [emphasis added]

One of the attachments to that e-mail re-iterated this and added that:

“To continue to use the service and benefit from its new features, you will need to prepare by transferring your users to the new service platform ahead of 28^th February 2007“

One of the other attachments that followed over the next few days stated that we would have to un-install the Netstore software, download and install new software from Star, run a new backup for the first time and then continue as normal. So I’d basically put it off until today, knowing that we could then run a couple of big backups to kickstart it from scratch over the weekend and before this deadline.

Except…

Except one of the unannounced “improvements” is that the service is now capped at 4GB, or around 20% of the storage we’ve been using with no worrries and no complaints up to this morning. 4GB of storage. For £211.52 this year and every year. Only nowhere do you find this out until you install the “brand new and improved” software.

I’ve just spent another half hour on the telephone to Star trying to resolve this but no-one who can do anything appears to be working for Star today (who are now blaming BT for the cap…).

So unless it’s resolved this afternoon, Star can kiss goodbye to our business for good and we’ll buy our own data storage elsewhere. For a lot less than we’re paying Star.