LastPass Premium not worth it – beware of bad policies

I was a happy and long term customer of LastPass. Had hundreds of passwords saved in their vault, mostly for my work. Until recently. LastPass inefficient work and very frugal and not customer friendly policies resulted in losing all my secure data, beyond recovery.

Here’s what hapenned:

• 15.11.2016 – issues with logging in – Invalid Password, so I tried recovering it, later resetting it. No help, just couldn’t log in.
• 15.11.2016 – filed a ticket (as a premium – paying customer) asking for help, stating it’s urgent, for my work. Thought I’d get a response straight away, considering LastPass offers just this one service – keeping my most sensitive data safe and accessible, so if it’s not accessible, they will act with needed urgency.
• 24hrs later, I got a response apologizing for getting back late (what became standard for every response from now on), which is very late given the nature of the service and data
• I was given instructions to remove LastPass, create a new Chrome user profile, which I did and responded back straight away.
• Next day, I got a response – basically, I got one response per day. Not the approach I would expect if you sell one single service – keeping your customers most sensitive data safe.
• No responses over the weekend. Imagine your bank would also take the weekend off, and you couldn’t access your money.
• After several days of resetting, deleting LastPass local folders etc I was able to log in, but all LastPass data was corrupted – entries were there, but no user, password or other data. And I was told my LastPass data is lost forever!

I enquired about a backup – surely LastPass backs up customers data very securely across various servers, for different periods. WRONG. They only hold two backups of customers data:

• 24hrs
• 7 days

Nothing more. If your issue is older than 7 days, then you’re buggered.

Result?

Lost hundreds of passwords that I entrusted LastPass and their services / policies, including my money as a premium customer. What did I get back?

• slow and inefficient customer service
• bad policies – not enough backup for my data, no customer service at the weekend
• holes in LastPass system – how on earth can a data storage company just lose all your data and not be able to recover it?

I get it, it’s encrypted, so somewhere along the lines the encryption got corrupted and the data is inacessible. Shit happens. I wouldn’t be writing this article, if they did all they could to recover my data. But I definitely didn’t get a feeling that they did what they could. Just standard responses within company specified frugal response times – reset, delete, install again.

Did a technician try to talk to me, get my password and try to de-encrypt the data? No. Did they go out of their way to help a customer they let down? No.

Is LastPass premium worth it? No, if you buy premium to ensure quick problem resolution, should one arise. Maybe, if you want to share your vault and don’t care about possibly losing all your data.

Would I recommend lastpass? Not anymore.