Keepit Review

Keepit is an online backup provider based in Denmark that has been in business since 2007. It has two products: Keepit and Keepit Classic. The former is a cloud-to-cloud backup service that mirrors files in Office 365, G Suite and soon Dropbox. The latter is similar to mainstream backup solutions like the ones you can find on our best online backup list.

Keepit Classic can backup servers, not just home computers or laptops. Because the cloud-to-cloud version is more suited for businesses that store huge amounts of data, this review will focus on Keepit Classic, which is suitable for home users.

Keepit Classic has a lot of upsides, but there are also serious downsides. It offers unlimited backup for cheap, supports all file types, which is rare, has 60-day versioning and works on a couple of Linux distributions. Its interface is clunky, though, and there’s no web client or mobile app for you to use when you’re away from your computer.

Unlike other backup solutions, the scheduling options are sparse. If you hit an issue, you’ll have to wait for an answer from support because the help website has few answers and some are in Danish. The privacy policy has its share of problems, too.

If you’re still interested in Keepit, though, stick with us as we go into more detail in this Keepit Classic review.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for Keepit

Features

Hard drives, be they internal or external, will eventually fail. The only thing that varies is the length of time they’ll last. External drives might last longer because they aren’t in use as much as internal drives, but they can also break down, get caught in a fire or flood or someone could steal them.

Keepit Classic says by subscribing to it and backing up your data to the cloud, you can avoid that and have peace of mind. That’s a realistic claim because the main feature of Keepit Classic is its unlimited backup space, which will help you protect your data.

You can backup files of any size and type, including, for example, Pro Tools sessions and Adobe Premiere Pro projects. If you’re a professional working with rare file types this is a key feature.

Once you upload your data to a Keepit data center, it’ll be replicated to at least one more data center in a separate geographical location. If you delete a file by mistake or fall victim to ransomware and your files are corrupted, you can rely on its 60-day backup history for recovery. It lets you restore deleted files, or previous versions of them, from the last 60 days.

Another interesting feature for businesses using Windows is the ability to distribute Keepit to their users via MSI deployment. If you need to backup and restore your whole system, you can, but only if you subscribe to the most expensive plan.

If your needs run in that direction, but you need more options, try CloudBerry Backup. It’s packed with features and options that let you customize your backup. Keep in mind that it might be too much for mainstream users, though. Learn more about it in our CloudBerry Backup review.

Keepit Scheduling

Keepit Classic, unlike most online backup solutions, doesn’t have many backup scheduling options. Backup is continuous and incremental by default, meaning after the initial backup is complete, Keepit Classic will only transfer the changed portion of the file, which saves time and bandwidth.

That approach is called block-level copying.

You can’t set the time you want your backup to run. Rather, it’ll run automatically once every day. What you can do is select the days of the week you want it to run. That’s sparse compared to other services. Keepit Classic also lacks a courier delivery service, which would be useful for big restore operations.

IDrive has a capable courier service that lets you backup or restore files by mail. It’s not free for restores but it’s useful if you need to restore a lot of data. Read more about it in our IDrive review.

Keepit Classic uses AES 256-bit to scramble your files, but it lacks two-factor authentication. There’ll be more on that in our “security” section below. If you want to learn more about backup features, services and practices, consult our backup library.

Keepit Features Overview

Pricing

The pricing table on the website shows three plans, but you don’t see every available version until you get to the checkout page.

Home Unlimited 1000 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 4.95/ month $59.40 billed every year 2-year plan $ 4.54/ month $108.90 billed every 2 years Save 8 %
Pro Desktop Unlimited GB Storage	1-year plan $ 14.95/ month $179.40 billed every year 2-year plan $ 13.70/ month $328.90 billed every 2 years Save 8 %
Pro Server 100 100 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 49.00/ month $588.00 billed every year 2-year plan $ 44.92/ month $1078.00 billed every 2 years Save 8 %
Pro Server 250 250 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 99.00/ month $1188.00 billed every year 2-year plan $ 90.75/ month $2178.00 billed every 2 years Save 8 %
Pro Server 500 500 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 169.00/ month $2028.00 billed every year 2-year plan $ 154.92/ month $3718.00 billed every 2 years Save 8 %

Regardless of which plan you choose, you can only pay for a year or two years. There’s no option to pay on a monthly basis. It would be nice to have the option, even if it’s a few dollars more, because it guarantees you flexibility. There’s no discount if you pay for one year, but you get a small discount and two free months if you pay for two years.

Before deciding to subscribe, you can use the free 30-day trial to test the service. You can try the Home Unlimited plan or the Pro Desktop plan.

Home Unlimited provides unlimited backup space for $4.95 per month or $59.40 per year. It’s good enough if you just want to backup your personal computer.

Pro Desktop adds central configuration, deployment and report tools to help you manage your business computers. It’s $179.40 per year which comes down to $14.95 per month. It supports multiple users and you can distribute licenses across your systems, add backup policies to individual machines or groups and manage them from your control panel.

The next plan in line is Pro Server, which comes in several versions, starting with Pro Server 100.

Pro Server 100 offers 100GB of backup space for your server. On top of the features in the Pro Desktop plan, it offers a full system backup and restore option. To enjoy that benefit and protect your servers, you’ll have to dish out a hefty $588 per year. The latter versions add more space and raise the price even more. The 500GB version is $2,028 per year.

If you need more space, Keepit Classic lets you buy more. The offer is scalable meaning if you reach the maximum capacity, Keepit Classic will add space in 500GB increments for an additional $165 per month. 500GB is $165 per month, 1TB is $330 per month and so on.

For home users, Carbonite is the most direct competitor. Its Basic plan also offers unlimited backup, but it’s $71.99 per year versus Keepit Classic’s $59.50.  That said, Carbonite’s other plans scale much better than Keepit Classic’s and they offer automatic video backup and courier recovery services. If that’s what you need, consult our Carbonite review to learn more.

Ease of Use

When you land on the Keepit website, you’re presented with Keepit, not Keepit Classic. To sign up for Keepit Classic, you have to click the link in the footer of the page. To add to the confusion, there’s a home backup version of the Keepit service that doesn’t offer a free trial.

Once you land on the Keepit Classic page, you can sign up for a trial of the Home Unlimited plan or the Pro Desktop plan. After that, you need to download the client, which works on all major versions of Windows and macOS, as well as Debian and RedHat versions of Linux. If you have a different version of Linux, read our best online backup for Linux article.

The app is easy to install. Just follow the instructions in the installer and you’ll be good to go. After installing, you’ll see the Keepit Classic app, with four tabs along the top that let you navigate it. The design feels dated and the app isn’t as intuitive as some of Keepit Classic’s competitors’.

Moving from tab to tab sometimes requires several clicks before the app responds. Navigating and selecting your files also feels slow and clunky. For example, Zoolz Home Cloud Backup takes a similar approach, but it’s folder tree is clearer and the selection view has two windows that let you navigate easily. Read more about it in our Zoolz Home Cloud Backup review.

That said, Keepit Classic’s tabs aren’t crowded with information and show only what you need to know. Thanks to that and its simple structure, the client is easy to use.

Unlike many solutions, Keepit Classic doesn’t have a mobile app to let you preview your backup files while you’re away from your computer. There are services that lack it, though, so the omission comes as a small surprise.

What’s more surprising is the fact that Keepit Classic doesn’t have a web client, which would let you access your backup from a different computer.

File Backup & Restoration

When backing up with Keepit Classic, you won’t be able to select folders or files for backup from your file system. Instead, you’ll complete the process from the Keepit Classic app.

The “settings” tab will help you select what you want to backup. Placing it there is confusing, though. The default view in it is the simple view. The simple view preselects a few folders. On Windows, they’re documents, desktop, favorites and pictures.

If you want to select folders yourself, you have to enable the advanced mode by clicking the “advanced view” link on the right. Selecting specific files for backup through a tree instead of the file system is bad enough, but only having the option to select folders is worse.

After you select the folders you want to backup, you can select which days you want the backup to run. You can’t select files, but you’re not restricted to folders, either. You can select everything above a folder in your file hierarchy.

That option, along with no restrictions on file size or type, enables you to backup a whole hard drive, or even a set of them in a RAID configuration, without trouble.

To restore your files you have to click the “restore” tab. Next, you have to click the “view all backups” or “restore latest backup” link. The default destination for your restore is “desktop,” which you can change by clicking “change destination.”

The “view all backups” link shows your sets of backups. You can restore everything from a backup set or browse it. If you choose to do the latter, you’ll see a tree structure like the one used for creating backups.

From there, you can select specific files to restore. Select the files or folders you want to restore and click “restore.” If you want to change the destination of your restore, click the “change destination” link below the folder hierarchy.

Finally, if you want to retrieve something that was included in your last backup, just click “restore latest backup” and the restore process will restore only those files.

Speed

Initial backups can take a long time, and that’s even more likely when you can backup unlimited data like you can with Keepit Classic. How long it takes depends on many factors, but chief among them are your connection bandwidth and how close you are to one of Keepit’s data centers. They’re in Denmark, the U.S. and Australia.

There’s no way to throttle your speeds if Keepit Classic takes too much out of your bandwidth, and there’s no option to increase the number of backup threads.

To test Keepit Classic’s speeds, we used a 1GB zipped folder. We ran our tests using a WiFi connection in Belgrade, Serbia, that had an upload speed of 6 megabits per second and a download speed of 100 Mbps. With those speeds, we calculated it should take about 21 minutes to upload our test folder and just over a minute to download it without overhead.

The upload speed was great because it averaged 28 minutes and 55 seconds. For comparison, many services take almost an hour to backup our test folder with the same speeds. To balance that, the download speeds were horrible. The time it takes to download averaged 23 minutes and 23 seconds when most services take around two minutes.

Security

Information on Keepit’s security practices is scarce. What we do know is that Keepit Classic uses AES 256-bit encryption and lets you keep a copy of your key. Because you only keep a copy of it, and not the only copy, the service isn’t zero-knowledge. There’s also a questionable clause in the privacy policy related to that. Read more about it in the next section.

Strong encryption will help protect your files, but it does nothing for your account credentials. Two-factor authentication does, though, but Keepit Classic doesn’t have it. Because of that, you should avoid creating a weak password, which would be easy prey for brute force attacks. Consult our guide on how to make a strong password to ensure that you do.

Keepit Classic uses the TLS protocol to secure your files in transit. Thanks to that, you can rest assured that man-in-the-middle attacks won’t be able to intercept your files.

Privacy

The personal information you supply to Keepit isn’t encrypted so your only protection is a strong privacy policy. We dove into it to see how strong it is. The first thing we noticed was the Feb. 18, 2008 date, which wasn’t encouraging. The policy has become invalid since then it doesn’t mention anything about the General Data Protection Regulation.

The GDPR is a regulation that protects the privacy of EU citizens, and it came into effect on May 25, 2018. You can read more about it in our GDPR guide.

Keepit’s privacy policy doesn’t read like some of the better policies we’ve read. It’s not as clear and has clauses that make you scratch your head. Take the one below, for example.

“KEEPIT is entitled to use external suppliers of various services that require the exchange of customer information for proper performance of the service. All KEEPIT’s suppliers are obligated to delete all the information upon completed delivery. KEEPIT disclaims responsibility for the individual supplier’s breach of that relationship.”

It’s nice that the external suppliers have to delete the data, but there’s no guarantee that they will. Plus, we don’t know which external suppliers or even what kind of services work with Keepit.

Keepit and Third Parties

There’s also a clause that protects the rights of third parties over users’. It seems like third parties have more protection than the users.

“The customer is to KEEPIT responsible to make sure that customer data does not infringe the rights of third parties. If there is legal action against the customer or KEEPIT, alleging that KEEPIT’s services violate the rights of third parties KEEPIT is entitled to, of their choice, to (I) change its services so that violations cease, or (II) terminate this agreement in whole or in part without further responsibility for KEEPIT.“

That said, Keepit has to treat users’ information in accordance with the applicable laws on personal data.

“By the signature of a subscription KEEPIT will register customer information hereby specifically name, address and e-mail in KEEPIT’s customer database. KEEPIT’s treatment of such information is subject to and will be in accordance with the law on the treatment of personal data.”

Strangely, the customer is required to let Keepit know of changes in email address, which makes sense, but also of changes to their residential address. If they fail to do so, Keepit can withdraw its services. Plus, users are held responsible for the data kept by Keepit.

“The customer decides, and is responsible for the personal information and data recorded on the customer’s subscription and how they are used. KEEPIT mainly administrates such personal data on instructions from the customer.”

Users must give Keepit written notice if the data they provide is subject to law.

“If there is data which are subject to the law on the treatment of personal data on the KEEPIT’s servers, the customer must give KEEPIT written notice of this and on the law on the treatment of personal data article 41, paragraph. 3-5 applies to KEEPIT’s treatment of the personal data.”

Plus, Keepit claims no responsibility for matters regarding laws on processing of personal data and the user’s data.

“KEEPIT is in every aspect without responsibility for all matters falling under the Law on the processing of personal data in connection with the customer’s processed data. Customer shall indemnify KEEPIT for any claim arising out of the Law on the processing of personal data, the second regulation of personal data or other public regulation in this connection.”

Like we said, zero-knowledge is a great plus for any service that wishes to ensure the privacy of its users. Keepit lets you keep your private key, but it seems that it can access it, too, on account of needing to continue operating and maintain security.

“KEEPIT reserves the right to gain access to customer’s stored data, to the extent that after KEEPIT’s best estimate is necessary for the KEEPIT’s operating and / or the security situation. KEEPIT and its staff will in this connection be subject to confidentiality and notify the customer that KEEPIT have had access to the stored data.”

If you want to make sure no one can browse your files, you may want to avoid Keepit and learn more about our best zero-knowledge cloud services instead.

On the bright side, Keepit will delete all your data within 30 days of the end of your subscription.

Support

Keepit has a searchable support website that works with all Keepit products, including Keepit Classic. The results are separated by product, so when you search for a solution, you can select between them and see solutions for each. A better approach would be to select a product to see the most common issues, then perform a search if needed

There are few articles for Keepit Classic and most are in Danish, even though the website is in English. Forums are available, but they won’t be much help, either, because they aren’t active.

You can send a request via email and get a response within 24 hours. We shot out several questions, but only got a response to one. It was terse, too, providing only limited information. There’s a chat option, as well, but when we tried it during the workday, it said the chat support team is offline.

The Verdict

Keepit Classic is a great service, if you disregard its faults, such as its sketchy privacy policy, shortage of support article on the help website, clunky and dated desktop client and lack of a web client. Plus, the desktop client has few scheduling options and the mobile app is missing altogether.

If you get past those faults, you’ll find that Keepit Classic provides unlimited backup space for cheap, supports all file types and lets you enjoy 60-day backup versioning. It also works on Linux, unlike many services. Whether that’ll be enough to consider subscribing to it depends on your needs.

What do you think of Keepit Classic? Is unlimited backup for cheap enough to disregard its flaws? If not, what other services are you considering? Tell us in the comments below. Thank you for reading.