If you want your own cloud storage/backup lima is not the answer

I purchased a lima (advertised as a personal cloud) when they first came out. Ever since then I have been cursing the decision. I should have known, it was advertised on facebook and on visiting the site you are greeted with the news that the 'waiting list' for the product is at 97% and almost full. I see many months on this is still the case, despite this your product will ship just as if it was in stock.

Your receive a little plastic block (blue and white) which has 3 connectors, usb, network and power.

So to the first issue one connector is on one end (USB) and the other 2 on the other (Network and Power) so it doesn't make for a tidy install when you set it up. You'll note the website never shows it plugged in. The power connector can easily fall out or be knocked out so make sure you route the cable carefully.

Secondly it only supports USB 2 drives/USB 2 mode so its not particularly fast.

There is not even an led to indicate it is powered up, connected to the network, logged on to your account, working, syncing or for that matter anything else. Normally I curse everything having an led but in this case it would have been useful.

When you need support you will find you need to see if its 'warm or cold' to determine whether it is powered up, you'll have to check your router to see whether it has an ip address and manually test whether it might be able to access the outside world.

First of all, check that your Ethernet and power cables are correctly plugged in.
Then, could you please answer the following questions?
1. Is the Lima device cold or warm?2. Does the wall socket work fine if you plug another equipment?3. Does your hard drive's led light up when hooking it up to the Lima device? Does it spin?4. Does your router's Ethernet port led light up when you plug the Lima device in? If No: Could you please try to plug your Lima to another router port? Could you also plug Lima with another ethernet cable?
From the router settings:
1. Does the Lima [MAC address](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address) appear?2. Does the Lima get an IP address?3. Is there a firewall (on your computer and/or on your router)? Does it allow Lima and the Lima app?4. Test the following URLs on a computer connected to the same network as Lima: http://portquiz.net:25211 and http://test-connectivity.meetlima.com/
Please send me a screenshot of the results.

All of this could have been done with an LED which indicated its status and/or the issue. LED off, no power, all fine, on, various number of flashes - various error states.

Support is an laboriously slow process where you have to answer to scripted questions, many of which you may have already covered, be prepared to be patient, repeat yourself and to reboot your router. Once you've done that the information gets passed on to Technical Support who will take some time to answer. Bear in mind you've lost access to all your data whilst this happens.

Thank you for your message. We’re really sorry for the inconvenience. I forwarded your case to our Technical Support Team which will investigate further. I will get back to you as soon as I get an update from them. Their reply time could take some time, so we thank you in advance for your patience. In the meantime, let me know if I can be of any assistance.

In this case it tool a week for Technical support to respond and tell me my lima needed replacing for the second time.

Let me first apologize for getting back to you only now. We received hundreds of questions, and we take the time to answer them one by one. We try to answer personally every single question, so it takes a bit of time. Thank you for your patience. After investigation, your Lima seems to be damaged. We can then offer a full replacement of your Lima package. Before doing so, you will need to follow a few steps listed below. We strongly recommend you to backup any data you could have transferred to your Lima drive. Otherwise, they won’t be accessible anymore. See how to retrieve files from Lima's drive to your computer. The account you created when receiving your first Lima won’t be accessible anymore. Your previous account will be erased so that you can create a new one as a new Lima user. To be able to use the same email address, please contact us when receiving your new device. Have you changed your shipping address since you placed your order? please keep us informed so we will know where to ship your replacement (shipping address + phone number). You don't have to send us back the damaged device, so you can keep it. If you've received a gift with your Lima (earphones), you can keep it as well, as we won't be able to replace it. Your new device will be shipped very soon, you will be recontacted when it leaves our warehouse. Please expect some shipping delays though.

You'll find there is no way of identifying your Lima, no serial number or mac address is printed on it, so if you have 2 like me which are both called 'Blue Lima' by the software you will have to put a label on each one with its serial number/mac address and ip address.

You may find your lima works fine BUT when it does fail you are in for a shock, it has to be sent back and they send you a new one, now you'd think they'd just update your account with the new Lima's mac address, you'd plug it in and continue as before but you'd be wrong.

Bear in mind this is sold as a non techie home cloud. Here are the instructions to replace your failed Lima.

Since it is damaged and returned back, it is not possible to unpair it anymore. The only workaround would be resetting your account so that you can have a Lima and its backup only that are paired to your account.
Here are the preliminary steps:
First, please, eject your Lima Drive from Lima Menu > Preferences > Status as described [here](https://support.meetlima.com/en/articles/203938719-How-should-I-power-off-my-Lima-device). When the hard drive is confirmed as ejected, you will see a confirmation message. This may take a minute.Do not forget to [backup all the necessary data](https://support.meetlima.com/articles/207426143-How-to-retrieve-files-from-Limas-drive-to-my-computer) you copied in your Lima space before you uninstall.
1. Uninstall your Lima apps from all your devices. Need help to uninstall the apps? Check [this article](https://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/204931205-How-to-uninstall-Lima-) in our Knowledge Base.2. Unplug the ethernet wire and wait for a minute.3. Unplug your HDD.4. Unplug the power supply.5. Replug the ethernet wire.6. Replug the power supply.7. Plug your HDD into your computer and format it (to NTFS for Windows or HFS+ for Mac). Keep it unplugged for the time being.
Please get back to me when all these steps have been performed so that I can delete your Lima account.

So to replace a faulty Lima you have to copy all the files off it, format the drive, they have to delete your account, then set up a new one, configure the limas and finally copy all the data back.

You will have also lost any files which were in the process of being loaded to the lima when it failed and are presumably in the cache on your computer, well at least they were until you remove the app as instructed above and deleted your account.

Suddenly you wonder wonder what happens if Lima Technolody Inc goes bust, your lima won't work without your account details stored on their server (so much for your own cloud) and all the data stored on the drive is encrypted, so from what I can see if they go bust you say bye bye to all your date stored on it. Presumably if they are for any reason offline you may not be able to use your Limas either?

I originally bought the product as I thought it would be a fit and forget storage and backup solution, as I bought 2 limas.

It took over six months to get an answer from support how to configure 2 Lima's in a configuration without using upnp, in fact I worked it out myself in the end and they eventually confirmed that it would work.

I had confirmation from our Team, to connect 2 Limas with port forwarding, please follow these steps: - Manually redirect port 25211 to one of your Lima, - Please use the port 25212 to the second one.You can use any ports between 25211 and 25215 for your Limas. The Limas will eventually figure it out by themselves (but may take 5-10 minutes) This is relevant to do it manually only if you plan to do a manual redirection. If you are using UPnP/IGD or NAT-PMP, it's automatic. Please do not hesitate to get back to me if you have any further question.

upnp is commonly disabled as software can create security holes in your router without you knowing. In addition its common to have a secure area and a non secure area on your home network. If you do have a separate secure area you'll need hairpinning/loopback on your router so devices behind the firewall can access the Limas. Unfortuately upnp does not support this.

If you are lucky you can define permanent dhcp addresses for the Limas on your router and the port mapping outlined above and everything will work 'eventually'.

It would have been nice to have a simple way to allocate a name, ip addresses and port to each Lima  permanently.

Similarly a simple piece of software could allow you to perhaps diagnose what is wrong with it. There is a diagnostic dump feature in the Lima app on windows which you send to support as I have done many times but without any response.

The windows software seems to take an age to determine the status of the Limas and then a few minutes on it might change its mind. More recent versions seem more accurate. That said there is little indication there is anything wrong with your lima, the task bar icon just changes colour so it could be weeks or months before you notice a fault, you might notice the pop up notification but as it disappears within a few seconds you might not.

The linux version has no gui so you've got to be happy with the command line.

The android version appears to need you to start it to perform the sync and used to eat the battery on my phone.

Forget using the Lima app on a HD pc like a surface pro, the font used is so small its pretty impossible to read anything.

You'll need fine finger control when trying to check the status of uploads too as you have to hover over the different coloured slices of a status bar to see what's what, the slices being proportional to the size of the drive, even then its very vague and there is no way to see what is actually waiting to go.

On a security note your devices might decide to talk to each other through a 'free' relay, on the face of it all the data is encrypted but the whole point of these devices was that the data did not leave your control, now the data is being routed via a relay server located god knows where and controlled by god knows who. There should be an option to disable this feature.

Suffice to say I've had my Limas for 18 months or so now, I've had 2 fail and I've not trusted them with any of my data yet as they are simply too unreliable.

All in all it was a clever idea but it should have stayed on the designers bench until it was fit for purpose. With some sort of status indicator, better software, some form of proper diagnostics, proper support for non pnp environments/secure environments and some thought to easily replacing a faulty unit this could have been a really good product particular when run as a pair.

Mine are most likely just going to be dumped in the parts bin and await recycling.