"Forcing lifetime accounts to pay"

Zoolz responded. No need to pay for lifetime. It's free for life.

"Zoolz left us all in the cold!"

Today I tried to access one of my files from my "Instant Vault" but found out that it's a total scam!

I need to wait for an email to download a file that is less than 1MB in size? And getting this email seems to be hours or even days away...

I signed up for Zoolz and paid for a Lifetime plan to easily access all my photos using my Android-phone.

Luckily enough though, most of my photos are under 8MB (16MP) since I use JPEG-files as previews for my RAW-files, which means that I still get thumbnails for most photos.

As a lifetime plan user, I can't recommend this service to anyone.

Even as an amateur photographer, whom wants to backup my photos, Zoolz is just too limited.

Another problem I faced a few times, is the limit to upload folders containing more than 1000 files using the web interface, which I easily do if I shoot more than 500 pictures in a day...

Zoolz started out as a great service, but now we are just left in the cold.

"I'm yet another lifetime user that fell victim to this awful product"

I'm yet another lifetime user that wasted money on this terrible product. It hasn't backed up my data in 55 days and always just says "internet connection issue..". My internet is rock solid so this is a problem on their end. No support either. Stay away from the low cost lifetime price scams you see offered on some sites, it's a bait and switch.

"Went From 4 Stars to 1 Star for Lifetime Customers"

Overall before this year (2020) I would've given Zoolz a four star rating as a Lifetime customer since it worked fine in my lite usage scenario. Now the most I can give them is one and a half stars. If I were a Lifetime customer with a heavier usage scenario I doubt I'd give them more than half a star. So I compromised on one star.

Situation
- 2016-09 purchased 500GB Lifetime Plan
- 2018-12 upgraded with the purchase of 1.5TB Lifetime Plan
- Fairly lite user of the cold storage ~ once/day
- Use about 360GB of the 1.5TB of cold storage
- Rarely if ever use the Instant Vault storage

Experience
- Until this year I rarely had an issue with Zoolz itself.
Most "issues" could be traced to Internet or PC problems.
- For my lite usage backup speeds were fine.

What's Changed - Zoolz has downgraded the service for Lifetime Plan customers.
- According to Zoolz tech support "All lifetime users share the same backup bandwidth channel which may sometimes results in backup malfunctions and interruptions..."
- This change explains the slowdowns and interrupts I've seen in archiving my files. While it's annoying that archives take longer it's not a large problem for my use case.
- Unfortunately Zoolz appears to see no problem with Lifetime customers being unable to perform backups for days at a time. Even with my lite usage I've experienced two instances this Summer where the archive process was unable to even connect to the servers for approximately two days each time. Note these were not cases where the backup process constantly dropped the connection to the server and then reconnected. These were instances where the
process could NEVER connect to the server. This problem is not that easy to just shrug off even in my lite use case.
- Zoolz technical support apparently no longer answers follow-up questions from Lifetime customers. They still answer initial questions, but it appears their standard response will be your problems are caused by the shared bandwidth channel and you need to pay for a maintenance contract on the "Lifetime" plan you purchased.
- A secondary problem is that Zoolz has not modified their backup software to indicate when problems a Lifetime user is experiencing are caused by this new limitation. Rather Zoolz just uses the standard message "Connection lost. Please check your internet connection." This leaves the user unnecessarily pursuing useless troubleshooting steps
when the problem is due to the shared bandwidth channel.

"Lifetime subscriptions doesn't not…"

Lifetime subscriptions doesn't not include maintenance. what?

why call it lifetime then?

after a year you will receive and nice notice on your dashboard: "Your Maintenance Plan Has Expired!"

You have to wait couple days just to download your files. Please stay away.

"Untrustworthy in every way imaginable. I think most positive reviews here are bought!"

UPDATE:
Zoolz is LYING in their comment to my post. I never had a "premium" plan that ran out. I paid a lot of money for the lifetime plan, and at some point they decided to DOWNGRADE the plan, not stick to the agreement, and bully users to pay them more money, even though they promised lifetime service.

Untrustworthy in every way imaginable:
- very buggy software, both in terms of just the interface and it has lost data of mine. It's just not there when I relied on it being there
- I bought a lifetime plan, but they're actually not letting me use essential features (needed just to re-install zoolz after formatting the harddrive) without upgrading and paying them more (monthly!) money
- guess what, support isn't included in the PAID lifetime plan either - you have to upgrade for that. Now I don't know if it's bugs or their deceiving pricing policy that's keeping me from using the service.

Run for your life.

"Scam indeed"

As everyone has mentioned here, this is a scam and I fell for it. "Your Maintenance Plan Has Expired!" in my case means my app keeps crapping out and I can't update it.
Shameful practice, reported to BBB but I doubt it will do any good.
Keep the reviews coming it's the only way to alert others.

"Lifetime accounts are penalized. We paid for a service, they no longer honor the service."

Back in February of this year they decided to no longer honor the lifetime accounts. The following email was sent to lifetime account holders:
"Hello
Due to the high demand for premium services, we are no longer offering basic plans to any of our customers. This means we will be slightly increasing prices for our subscribers.
How will this affect you?
As a lifetime account holder you will not be forced to pay any additional costs, however, without upgrading your plan you may experience some issues using your account when we cease to support our basic plans of as February 1st, 2020."

The company is a sham. They expect you to pay for maintenance on a LIFETIME account purchase. LIFETIME was supposed to be a single purchase without additional fees. It's not like buying a car where you expect to have additional cost of ownership.

Update: After the reply from Zoolz about my account being "available"
"
Final Notice: Your data will be deleted in 5 days

To our home users: We understand what a huge inconvenience and disappointment our previous announcement was, regarding the closure of all Home plans from Zoolz. We have made a continuous effort since our first announcement, to help all our Home users restore their data, or migrate to our heavily discounted business plan. We also extended the deadline for users to restore their data by six weeks. However we must give this final notice to inform users that they have five [5] days left to restore any outstanding data they still have on our servers, before it is permanently deleted on 22nd of November.


Stay Safe,
Zoolz Team
"

"Great tool for auto backups."

Great tool for automated backup of software, which also backs up network drives. Support quick to reply and with resolutions.
Interface for accessing the backup data is awesome, and allows sharing with others on an individual file basis, and restores are quick too, via downloads.
I've been using it for over a year now.

"Zoolz falls out with "lifetime" customers."

Have a lifetime 1+1GB contract for one PC and experienced difficulties when my hard drive failed and I could not access my data (they do not let you use another PC to download your files). I then had a longwinded process of getting my old PC back up and running before Zoolz allowed me to restore files in small chunks. Having completed this process over 4 days I now want to transfer my single PC licence to a new PC and there is no obvious (probably deliberate) way to do this. Be careful before you take out a service from this company as they appear to be reneging on their lifetime storage agreement.