Today, I am going to talk about backup software from one of the leaders in cloud backup, IDrive.

With IDrive, all you need is one account to backup data from your computers and mobile devices. There are no limits to the number of devices you back up, which makes this one of the best offerings available.

Plans available

IDrive has three plans to choose from. The Basic plan is free and gives you 5 GB of space. You can also get additional space credited when you refer your friends and associates. This plan is a great choice if all you need is a bare bones solution for your home or small office. The Personal plan is available for $52 per year and gives you 1TB of storage, whereas the Business plan gives you 250GB of storage for $74 per year.

The fairlylow storage for the business plan is a bit of a downer, although the plan somewhat makes it up by way of other capabilities.

Features available in both Personal and Business plans

While both the Personal and Business plans give you a lot of great functions, the Business plan supports Server backups for SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, and Oracle, and also supports Linux backups. Additionally, the Business plan also gives you priority support through email, phone and live chat. Both these plans allow you to remotely manage computers and allow you access via smartphone devices. They support all Windows versions up to 10 and Mac machines.

Let us now take a closer look at the features that are common to both of these plans.

Whatever device you possess, be it an iPhone, a laptop or an Android phone, all of them can be protected under one account for a low fee. Once backed up, you get access to your files from any web browser or computer. In addition, you can restore files to any computer or any mobile device and keep files automatically synced up across devices.

One nice touch is that you can set up automatic schedules for backing up data. So, no more wondering about when the last backup had been made and setting up reminders in Outlook!

Security wise, you are on strong ground with data being transferred and stored with 256-bit encryption. A private key option is also available, which means you can set it up in a manner that no one other than you can access the data if that is your need. This gives IDrive a significant leg up over competing offerings like Google Drive and iCloud.

What is great with IDrive is that you are able to easily share files via Twitter, Facebook and email, which makes it a great fit for businesses actively maintaining social media accounts. It also allows you to backup video and photos from Facebook and Instagram.

What are the other significant features available?

Well, to start with, retrieval of deleted files is supported up to 30 days, which takes the ‘too late to do anything about it’ factor out of the picture. IDrive does full archiving, means that nothing is ever deleted from your online account unless you do it manually. So all those old files that are deleted off your computer’s hard drive are still there in IDrive, meaning that the possibilities of data loss are greatly minimized.

Features offered by the Business Plan

Let us now dig a little deeper into features that are unique to the Business plan. If you are a system administrator or the owner of a small business, this plan would be a great choice, and you will shortly see exactly why.

One really convenient aspect of IDrive is the dashboard which gives you a single place from which you can manage data backups for all your remote machines. Not only can you view information about each user’s space utilization, but you can also make changes to settings across multiple devices at the press of a key. Saves time, Avoids errors, the whole nine yards.

What this plan also gives you is the ability to backup an entire hard drive including the operating systems software and associated settings at one go. As an administrator, it is a given that you would very often be required to take whole disk images for disaster recovery and backup purposes. IDrive comes in handy for this purpose and takes away a lot of the grunt work that would otherwise need to do.

The software also gives you an easy way to restore from the disk image when needed. You can even restore directly to an external hard drive, should you need to do that. While data backup solutions are common, the ability to backup OS software is quite rare. IDrive really deserve plaudits for providing this capability at an affordable price point.

IDrive Express service

Another nifty feature is the Express service which helps you backup up to 3TB of data to your online account without cornering all your bandwidth. This can be very useful in taking the first backup for very large amounts of data. Once you execute the backup at your end and send the drive back, IDrive completes the upload to your online account. Once that is done, you can get back to doing incremental backups at your end. Given that the Business plan allows you to do an Express backup three times in a year, this can be quite convenient. And should a need arise to use a backup, you can anyways have a drive shipped in within a week.

IDrive One local backup service

One final thing I would like to talk about is the IDrive One local backup device available at $79.50 for 1 TB storage. Local backups are complementary to online backups because they are able to provide superfast data restores. So, by availing a combination of both online and local backup, you are able to take care of your disaster recovery requirements comprehensively.

What I like about this device is that it is fully integrated into the IDrive online backup application. And it is not just files and documents that can be backed up. You can back up entire SQL Server databases, SharePoint servers, Exchange servers and even complete disk images to the device.

In Summary

All in all, IDrive’s backup offering is both comprehensive and affordable, the only blemish being the comparatively low storage for the business plan. Other than that, it ticks all the boxes in terms of affordable pricing plans, security, features, and reliability.