IDrive Review

IDrive is a piece of cloud backup software that provides a whole host of features, both in terms of the actual backup process as well as more unusual features, such as cloud synchronization and file sharing. 

There’s not much bad to say about the service’s privacy and security, either, which makes for a well-rounded product. For more details on why we like it, keep scrolling and read our full IDrive review.

Besides the backup process itself being feature-rich, the service does a good job of protecting your data, both from accidental loss and intentional snooping. Its pricing plans are also reasonable, even offering a completely free plan with no time limit, but sadly no unlimited plans. Customer service is also excellent, but the upload and download speeds could be a lot better.

We’ll break all of this down as we move through each section of the review, so keep reading if this sounds like a package you’d be interested in. However, if the lack of unlimited and monthly plans is a deal breaker for you, head over to our list of the best online backup services to find some alternatives.

IDrive Video Review

IDrive Review 2020: Is It The Best Cloud Backup?

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for IDrive

Features

IDrive is an incredibly feature-rich service, and it manages to tick every box on our list of functionality that we would like to see in a cloud backup solution. In fact, it even includes sync and sharing capabilities that allows it to compete not only with other backup services, but also cloud storage solutions, such as Dropbox.

The desktop client is available on Windows and Mac operating systems, but not on Linux. Although you can still use the service on a Linux machine by using the web client, you might want to check out our list of the best cloud backup for Linux to find a service that offers a dedicated desktop client for the operating system.

In terms of the backup features themselves, IDrive supports image-based, NAS, mobile, external hard drive and hybrid backup, all of which can be done on a continuous or scheduled basis. We’ll cover these features in more depth in the file backup and restoration section further down, so for now let’s have a look at what else IDrive has to offer.

If a file or folder is deleted, it remains in the IDrive archive until you manually delete it, ensuring that nothing is ever lost by accident. The same goes for previous versions of files, which makes it easy to revert any changes you may have made.

IDrive also offers mobile apps on both Android and iOS, and unlike other services such as SpiderOak ONE, these apps allow you to perform backups of your mobile device, rather than just acting as a management portal for your backed up desktop data.

If backing up your photos is important to you, you might like IDrive’s “timeline” feature, which is accessible from the web client and mobile apps, and gives you a type of gallery view of your photos for easier viewing.

IDrive Sync and Share Features

Something that really sets IDrive apart from most of its competition is the inclusion of what is normally considered cloud storage features. 

You can set up sync folders that automatically synchronize their contents between devices, and this also effectively doubles your storage space, as filling up this folder does not eat into your backup storage. This means that you can use IDrive as an alternative to apps like Google Drive or pCloud, on top of its function as an online backup service.

Setting up the folder is a very straightforward process, and once it’s set up you can move it wherever you like, as well as enable selective sync to prevent certain files or folders from syncing to specific devices. Unlike, for example, SpiderOak ONE — which offers the same kind of functionality — the folder does not need to be part of your regular backup.

In order to access the share feature, you need to use the IDrive web client. Not including this in the desktop app seems like an odd choice, but regardless, the web client is easy to use and also provides an overview of all your devices. To share a file or folder, all you need to do is select the item in the web client, right-click it and select “share.”

This will open a dialogue where you can enter the email address of the person or people you wish to share with, as well as set their access privileges, allowing the recipient to either view or edit the file. Unfortunately, you can’t simply copy a link, meaning you have to send the share invite over email.

IDrive Business Features

If you’re looking for business backup, then IDrive offers some additional functionality beyond that of its personal plans. The most important one is the ability to create multiple user accounts for one plan. You can give different users access to different files and permissions as well as organize them into groups and propagate the settings and access rights from there.

Besides deciding what files each user can access, you can also set all the other IDrive settings like scheduling, throttling, versioning, continuous data protection and notifications.

The other notable extra feature of IDrive’s business plans is support for single sign-on, or SSO for short. This lets you connect IDrive to your SSO service of choice to spare users from having to log in to the service manually. If you’re looking for an SSO provider that plays nice with IDrive, you can check out our list of the best SSO services for cloud storage.

IDrive Features Overview

Pricing

IDrive offers a wide range of plans, though most of them are intended for business users. You’re provided with a large amount of storage space as well as unlimited devices with all plans, and there’s even a completely free basic plan with no time limit.

The cheapest personal plan gives you a 2TB storage limit at a price tag of $69.50 per year, which is quite reasonable. 

That said, other services like Backblaze (read our Backblaze review) and Carbonite offer unlimited storage, and in the case of Backblaze, the price is actually a bit lower ($60 per year) than IDrive’s cheapest plan (read our IDrive vs Backblaze and IDrive vs Carbonite comparisons). If two or five terabytes isn’t enough for you, check out our list of the best unlimited cloud backup services or head over to our Carbonite vs. Backblaze comparison.

Unfortunately, there’s no plan that lets you pay per month, so your only option is to pay for a full year upfront. This is a bit of a drawback, especially if you’re not convinced that you’ll want to stick with the service that long. Luckily, though, there’s a basic free plan that comes with 5GB of storage that lets you thoroughly test it out before committing to a full year.

Unlike other services with a free trial, a basic account is not time-limited, so if you only need to backup a small amount of data, you can do so in perpetuity, completely free of charge. Furthermore, IDrive is currently on sale, offering its 2TB and 5TB personal plans for $52.12 and $74.62, respectively, for users signing up for their first year.

Free 5 GB Storage	FREE
Personal 2TB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 2000 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 5.79/ month $69.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 5.79/ month $139.00 billed every 2 years
Personal 5TB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 5000 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 8.29/ month $99.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 8.29/ month $199.00 billed every 2 years
Business 250GB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 250 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 8.29/ month $99.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 8.29/ month $199.00 billed every 2 years
Business 500GB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 500 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 16.62/ month $199.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 16.62/ month $399.00 billed every 2 years
Business 1.25TB 1250 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 41.62/ month $499.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 41.62/ month $999.00 billed every 2 years
Business 2.5TB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 2500 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 66.62/ month $799.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 66.62/ month $1599.00 billed every 2 years
Business 5TB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 5000 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 124.96/ month $1499.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 93.73/ month $2249.50 billed every 2 years Save 25 %
Business 12.5TB Large discount for first-time signup. Details 12500 GB Storage	1-year plan $ 249.96/ month $2999.50 billed every year 2-year plan $ 249.96/ month $5999.00 billed every 2 years

No matter which plan you choose, you can backup an unlimited number of devices with a single account, whether they’re desktop machines, tablets or smartphones. All paid personal plans also give you one IDrive express backup per year, while restores cost $99.50 per request, plus additional shipping fees for customers outside of the U.S.

IDrive Business Pricing

IDrive also offers a bunch of different business plans with a wide range of storage caps. The two cheapest of which are only available on an annual basis and cost $99.50 and $199.50 per year for 250GB and 500GB of storage respectively. In addition to the annual subscriptions, the remaining four business plans are all available monthly as well.

These plans offer 1.25TB, 2.5TB, 5TB and 12.5TB and cost $49.95, $75.95, $149.95 and $299.95 per month respectively. You can still sign up for a full year, in which case the prices are $499.50, $799.50, $1499.50 and $2999.50 per year. The same discounts offered for IDrive personal applies here, which lower the prices by 25-percent, but only for the first year.

Besides offering more storage space and the additional business features, these plans also give you three free uses of IDrive Express annually, as opposed to just one.

Ease of Use

IDrive’s interface presents a clean look and is easy to wrap your head around. Everything you need is easily accessible in the main menu of the client. Both the web interface and mobile app are similarly well-designed and easy to work with.

The desktop client is separated into six main areas, all located in the main menu on the left-hand side of the window. These are: “backup,” “restore,” “scheduler,” “sync,” “server backup” and “settings.”

In the “backup” tab, you can choose which files or folders are to be backed up, see the progress of the backup while it’s in progress and switch between backing up to your IDrive account or a local device.

The “restore” tab gives you an overview of all your devices and the files you’ve backed up for each one. Here you can select folders from a device to download or restore them — to a new or the original location — as well as delete backed up data.

You can also use the “snapshots” function to find files backed up before a certain date, and click “view trash” to find deleted items.

In the “scheduler” tab, you’ll find the controls for automatic backups. You can set a daily schedule or select specific days that you want the backup to be performed on.

The “sync” tab gives you a simple overview of your sync folder, consisting of a shortcut to the folder itself and a button to move it to a new location.

The “server backup” tab probably won’t be of much interest to the majority of users, but here you can select different types of servers to backup, including MS SQL, Oracle, Exchange and others. Clicking “backup” or “restore“ on one of these brings up the login dialogue for the server itself before starting the operation.

Finally, in the “settings,” you can turn on continuous backup, CPU or data throttling, as well as adjust other settings like notifications and file exclusions.

IDrive Mobile App and Web Client

IDrive also sports an excellent web client that lets you perform all the same tasks that its desktop version does. By entering the dashboard, you get in-depth control of each device, even letting you initiate a backup or restore action remotely.

As for the mobile app, its main purpose is helping you use IDrive to backup videos and photos stored on your phone and tablet. The main screen of the app provides an overview of all your photos that you have yet to backup to the cloud, as well as a backup button to quickly transfer all of them to your IDrive storage space.

The timeline feature for photos and videos is also accessible from the mobile app, as well as all of your synchronized folders. The access and restore tab shows you all of your devices, which you can then click on to view and download all the data backed up to said devices.

Finally, you can also use the app to manage all the folders you’ve shared with others and ones that have been shared with you.

File Backup & Restoration

IDrive comes with an incredibly rich set of functionality when it comes to its core purpose of backing up your devices to the cloud. Data can be backed up either as individual files or folders, or as a complete image of your hard drive. You can backup an unlimited number of desktop machines, mobile devices and servers locally, on the cloud or as a hybrid of both.

After your initial IDrive login, the client automatically includes a few folders for backup, including your “documents,” “music,” “videos,” “pictures,” and “desktop” folders. 

You can then choose to remove these and add other folders manually by clicking the “change…” button in the “backup” tab. If you want to perform a non-scheduled backup, you can simply click the “backup now” button in the same tab.

IDrive also supports both multithreaded and block-level transfers. The former means that IDrive can transfer multiple files at once, greatly increasing transfer speeds at the expense of higher CPU load. Meanwhile the block-level algorithm increases the speed of subsequent backups and saves data by scanning each file and only uploading the parts that have been modified.

You can choose the timing for your backup plan in the “scheduler” section of the IDrive client, which can be either hourly or daily. If your computer is turned off and misses an upload, you can tell IDrive to automatically start uploading once your device powers on, as well as have it email you when it succeeds or fails with a backup.

You can also turn on “continuous data protection” in the “settings” menu, which will keep files smaller than 500MB continuously backed up whenever changes are made to them locally. IDrive warns you that this is not a replacement for a scheduled backup, though, as this feature will ignore larger files and changes.

In addition to the regular method of backing up, you can also create a clone of your hard drive by clicking the “disk image backup” button in the desktop client. This can be done for either a complete system or just a single drive, and depending on the size could take days or even weeks to complete.

IDrive Express

To deal with extremely long upload times, IDrive offers a service called IDrive Express. This involves performing a local backup using IDrive before physically shipping a drive containing said backup to the company. 

If your system is several terabytes in size and you don’t have the fastest internet connection — or worse yet, your connection is capped — then this can be a life-saver, especially for your initial backup.

IDrive Mobile

As mentioned, you can backup your mobile devices using the Android and iOS apps. For iOS devices, this means your contacts, photos, videos and calendar, whereas the Android version also lets you backup music, text messages, your call history and any other miscellaneous files saved on the device.

Servers can also be backed up with IDrive, and by entering the “server backup” section of the client, you’ll see a range of different options, including most popular server architectures, whether it’s VMware, Oracle or MS SQL.

When restoring files, you have the option of downloading to a specific folder or restoring to the original location. Simply go to the “restore” tab, choose the restore location at the bottom of the window and click the “restore now” button to start the process.

Speed

Speed is a critical element of an online backup service. You’ll often need to upload large amounts of data, especially if you’re performing an image-based backup, as this clones your entire hard drive and can take days or even weeks if the service is slow. IDrive doesn’t do very well here, as speeds are far too slow, especially on faster connections.

To test the speed of IDrive, we uploaded and downloaded a 3.51GB folder filled with various file types, including pictures, video and text. Our connection for the test has a download and upload speed of roughly 120Mbps and 15Mbps, respectively, though exact speeds at any given moment are generally reliant on network load. 

Ideally with this connection, the download should take about five minutes and the upload around half an hour. More realistically, though, it will probably take around 10-15 minutes and 45 minutes to an hour, respectively. If IDrive compresses the files in storage, though, the download could be much quicker.

As you can see, these results are fine, even if they’re not amazing. The upload rate is about what we expected. However, we would’ve liked a faster download time, especially when compared to services like SpiderOak ONE, which compresses your files in order to significantly speed up download rates.

Seeing as IDrive’s data centers are located in the U.S., and this test was performed from Norway, you might be able to get better results for connections originating in North America.

One thing to note is that if your connection drops mid-backup, the IDrive desktop client has a hard time reconnecting and resuming the backup. We tested this and gave IDrive more than 20 attempts to reconnect, but in the end this scenario forced us to stop the backup and restart it for it to finish.

Security

IDrive features excellent security with strong encryption. Whether it’s physical security for its data centers in the event of a break-in or natural disaster, or network security to prevent data breaches and hacks, IDrive goes a long way to ensure that your data is safe.

Your data is protected both at-rest and in-transit with AES-256 bit encryption, which, as far as anyone knows, is unbreakable unless you have a supercomputer and a few billion years to crack it. Although we won’t spend time here in this article detailing how the encryption algorithm works, you can check out our description of encryption if you want to learn more.

By default, IDrive holds on to your encryption key, but you’re offered the choice to create a private key during signup. However, IDrive warns you that this will disable the sharing functionality described earlier in this article. You can also enable two-factor authentication for an added level of security.

In terms of physical data center security, IDrive utilizes raised floors and seismically braced racks to protect from earthquakes, temperature control systems with separate cooling zones to prevent overheating, and a state-of-the-art smoke detection and fire suppression systems to safeguard your data in the event of a fire.

Given that your data is encrypted with AES-256, the biggest risk to your files is physical theft and social engineering. IDrive protects against this by implementing motion sensors, 24/7 secured access, video surveillance and security breach alarms to ensure that no unauthorized access to the servers can take place.

On the network side of things, IDrive runs periodic third-party reviews of its infrastructure to ensure that no known vulnerabilities are present.

Privacy

Not only does IDrive offer excellent security, it’s also dedicated to user privacy. Featuring an excellent privacy policy, private encryption and compliance with GDPR and HIPAA, there’s very little to complain about in this area.

Like most cloud backup businesses, IDrive collects some personal information on its users. This includes your first and last name, payment details, as well as email and physical addresses. This is all pretty standard, and IDrive claims to never share this information with third parties without the user’s express consent.

However, IDrive does reserve the right to use said information to internally analyze and improve their service, as well as share it with trusted third-parties that work with IDrive to provide its services.

Another major caveat to this policy is if IDrive is compelled by law enforcement or local authorities to disclose your information. This can be bad news given that the data centers are located in the U.S., a country infamous for its poor digital privacy laws and willingness to implement dodgy programs and laws, such as the Patriot Act or PRISM.

Luckily, if you enable the private encryption key on signup, IDrive will not be able to disclose your backed up data with anyone, even the authorities, as only you possess the key necessary to decrypt your data. Thus, provided that you choose the correct option during signup, IDrive is a zero-knowledge service.

Support

There’s not much bad we can say about IDrive’s customer service, as it manages to provide everything you need in terms of support. If you need help with IDrive’s product, there’s a number of ways for you to go about getting it, from phone support to an extensive FAQ page.

First, there’s the extensive FAQ section offered on the company’s website, which includes answers to the most common questions, organized into categories for easier navigation.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, the next step would be to contact IDrive’s support department directly. The support department is open from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. PST and can be reached via phone, email or chat. 

The phone and chat options are obviously the quickest. Although the chat is open 24/7, the phone support is only available during opening hours, which might be problematic, depending on your timezone.

The support request form is quite detailed, asking you to provide your username and email address, as well as what operating systems and web browsers you’re currently using. To check the responsiveness, we sent a support request and received a reply within a day, which is really all you can ask for.

Users on one of IDrive’s business plans get access to “priority support,” though we couldn’t find any details on what this means exactly.

The Verdict

That concludes our review of IDrive. All in all, it’s an excellent service that’s rich in features — both in terms of cloud backup and cloud storage — with excellent privacy, security and customer support. However, upload and download speeds are not very good and there are a few snags when it comes to unstable connections.

IDrive’s plans are reasonably priced for what you’re getting, but unfortunately there are no unlimited plans. This isn’t a huge problem, though, as you’re provided with a large amount of storage space on all of the plans.

What do you think of our IDrive review? Do you agree that it’s a great service packed with useful features, or is the lack of a monthly plan and unlimited storage as well as slow speed deal-breakers for you? Let us know in the comment section below. As always, thank you for reading.

IDrive FAQ

• Is IDrive secure?

  Yes, IDrive is a secure service. When signing up, you can choose to keep your encryption key private, which makes it impossible for the company to decrypt your files without you knowing. All your data is protected with AES 256-bit encryption, as well as top-notch physical security to ensure the data centres are never compromised.

• How Does IDrive Backup Work?

  IDrive works by encrypting your data and transferring it securely to its data centers for backup. This is done via a block-level algorithm to save bandwidth, and as long as you’ve set up a private encryption key, only you can decrypt the data.

• Is IDrive and IBackup the Same Company?

  Yes, IDrive and IBackup are both products offered by the same company, IDrive Inc.