IDrive Review

If you’re in the market for an online backup solution, you’ve probably already heard of IDrive. It’s one of the most popular cloud backup services out there and one of the most functional ones. Plus, it’s incredibly cheap, considering the cornucopia of backup options it gives you. Got your attention? Strap in and read on for all the details in this IDrive review.

IDrive offers a unique combination of cloud storage and cloud backup (and no, they’re not the same thing), and you get as much cloud storage space as you do backup space. It also offers a host of backup features, including disk image backup, NAS backup and server backup, though its speeds could be better. IDrive’s privacy and security are airtight, too, which makes for a well-rounded product.

Key Takeaways:

• IDrive is one of the best cloud backup services out there, offering a ton of backup features for a low price.
• If security is paramount to you, IDrive gives you the option to create a private key for encryption, which makes it a zero-knowledge cloud backup service.
• IDrive is very reasonably priced, considering how many features it packs.

We’ll break all of this down as we move through each section of the review, so keep reading if this sounds like a service 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?

• Is IDrive Safe?

  Yes, IDrive is a secure service. When signing up for IDrive, 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 centers 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.

• Which Is Better, Carbonite or IDrive?

  On the whole, IDrive is the superior online backup service, thanks to its wider selection of backup options. That said, if you really need a cloud backup service with unlimited storage, Carbonite is a solid choice.

• Does IDrive Slow Down Your Computer?

  Although IDrive itself might be slow, its desktop app won’t slow down your computer. You may experience a slower internet connection while there’s an ongoing backup or restore process, just as you would expect when uploading or downloading files.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

IDrive is an incredibly feature-rich service, and it manages to tick every box on our list of functionality that we like to see in a cloud backup service. In fact, it even includes sync and file sharing capabilities that allows it to compete not only with other backup services (like Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office), but also with some of the best cloud storage providers, such as Sync.com and pCloud.

The IDrive desktop client is available on Windows and Mac operating systems, but not on Linux. Although IDrive offers a linux backup script and you can use the web client to manage your backup, 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.

Cloud Backup Features

In terms of the online 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.

IDrive doesn’t keep your deleted folders and files forever. They remain in the IDrive archive for 30 days or until you manually delete them, 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 Backup, 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, accessible from the web client and mobile apps, which gives you a type of gallery view of your photos for easier viewing.

IDrive Sync and File Sharing Features

Something that really sets IDrive apart from most of its competition is the inclusion of what are 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 you get the same amount of cloud storage as your online backup plan space.

You can move your sync folder wherever you like, as well as enable selective sync to prevent certain files or folders from syncing to specific devices. Plus, the folder does not need to be part of your regular backup.

If you want to share your synced files or the data you’ve backed up, IDrive makes it easy to do so. To share a file or folder, all you need to do is select the item in the web client or desktop app, right-click it and select “share.” You can set access privileges for shared file recipients, allowing them to either view or edit the file.

File sharing is only available if you choose the default encryption method instead of private encryption — a letdown considering most zero-knowledge cloud services do offer sharing. You are also forced to share via email, as you can’t simply copy a link to share.

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 copy 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.

A single IDrive for Business subscription lets you backup unlimited computers. Plus, you can backup as many external hard drives and NAS storage devices as you want (consult our what is NAS guide if you’re unfamiliar with them). In fact, we rank it as one of the best online backup for NAS options available.

You can backup network drives, too. That extends to servers including:

• Windows Server
• Linux server
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft SharePoint Server
• Oracle server
• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Hyper-V
• VMWare

However, there’s no unlimited backup. If you want this, you can read our best unlimited online backup list for ideas.

IDrive Business Versioning

IDrive’s file-versioning capability lets you restore from the previous 30 versions of any given file. That helps you protect your business data against both unwanted edits and file corruptions. Plus, IDrive uses Snapshots, which provide a historical view of your files that let you easily perform point-in-time restores.

To further protect against data loss, you can use IDrive’s Bare-Metal Disaster Recovery, or BMR for short. This lets you backup an entire hard drive — including the operating system and application configurations — to an on-site server. Transfers use IDrive’s CTB technology for incremental backups to reduce the time it takes to upload your new and changed files.

If you ever want to copy your BMR backup to your cloud account, you can do so by utilizing cloud replication. IDrive also indefinitely keeps deleted files, so you can only clear them manually from the trash bin or run an automated archive cleanup.

On top of that, IDrive, unlike many other backup services, doesn’t delete data from your backup, even if you delete it from your device. That means it supports true archiving. It’s useful if you need to free up space on your devices.

If you have a business that can’t afford to wait long to create an initial backup or restore files, you’ll benefit from IDrive Express. IDrive Express is IDrive’s courier backup-and-recovery service.

With it, IDrive will send you an external drive to load your data onto. After you send it back, IDrive’s technicians will load your data onto the cloud for you, typically within two to five days. You can also use the service to restore files, which will take, again, about two to five days. The courier service is free up to three times per year for business users.

IDrive Features Overview

	Visit IDrive
Backup
Backup Scheduler
Continuous Backup
Incremental Backup
Image-Based Backup
External Drive Backup
NAS Backup
Server Backup
Hybrid Backup
Mobile Device Backup
Unlimited Backup
Unlimited Devices
Speed Throttling
Block-Level File Copying
Multithreaded Backup
Restore
Courier Recovery Service
Browser Access
Mobile App Access
Versioning
Deleted File Retention
Security
Private Encryption
At-Rest Encryption
In-Transit Encryption
Encryption Protocol	AES 256-bit
Two-Factor Authentication
Hardened Data Centers
Proxy Server Settings
HIPPA Compliant
Support
24/7 Support
Live Chat Support
Telephone Support
Email Support
User Forum
Knowledgebase
Misc
File Sharing
Device Sync
Free Trial	Unlimited

Pricing

There’s very little to complain about with IDrive’s pricing. Although it’s not quite the cheapest cloud backup service, it certainly is a bargain when you consider its “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to features. It may not offer unlimited storage, but the IDrive Personal plan provides more than enough online storage to tide you over.

Personal 5TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 5TB

1-month plan

$7.95/month

1-year plan

$4.97/month

$59.62 billed every year

Save 37%

2-year plan

$4.97/month

$119.25 billed every 2 years

Save 37%

Personal 10TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 10TB

1-year plan

$6.22/month

$74.62 billed every year

2-year plan

$6.22/month

$149.25 billed every 2 years

Personal 20TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 20TB

1-year plan

$12.47/month

$149.62 billed every year

2-year plan

$12.47/month

$299.25 billed every 2 years

Business 250GB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 250GB

1-year plan

$6.22/month

$74.62 billed every year

2-year plan

$6.22/month

$149.25 billed every 2 years

Business 500GB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 500GB

1-year plan

$12.47/month

$149.62 billed every year

2-year plan

$12.47/month

$299.25 billed every 2 years

Business 1.25TB

• 1TB

1-year plan

$31.22/month

$374.62 billed every year

2-year plan

$31.22/month

$749.25 billed every 2 years

Business 2.5TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 3TB

1-year plan

$49.88/month

$598.50 billed every year

2-year plan

$49.97/month

$1199.25 billed every 2 years

Business 5TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 5TB

1-month plan

$149.95/month

1-year plan

$124.96/month

$1499.50 billed every year

Save 16%

2-year plan

$93.73/month

$2249.50 billed every 2 years

Save 37%

Business 12.5TB

• Large discount for first-time signup.
• 13TB

1-month plan

$299.95/month

1-year plan

$249.96/month

$2999.50 billed every year

Save 16%

2-year plan

$249.96/month

$5999 billed every 2 years

Save 16%

IDrive Subscription Options

IDrive offers a wide range of plans, though only three are intended for personal use, while the rest are targeted at business users. Plus, all cloud backup plans come with cloud storage features. This means IDrive can double as both an online backup and cloud storage service (talk about a deal).

However, IDrive’s best deal comes if you’re already using a paid backup service other than IDrive (including some cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive). Read our IDrive vs Dropbox comparison to see how the two compare. That could make you eligible for an astounding 90 percent discount on your first year.

IDrive Express is a courier backup feature which we’ll look into later in this review. The IDrive Personal and Team plans will give you one free IDrive Express backup per year and the Business plan gives you three. Subsequent Express backups will cost $59.95, while Express restores cost $99.50 per request, plus additional shipping fees, for customers outside the U.S.

IDrive Personal Pricing

IDrive’s paid plans are called IDrive Personal, Team and Business, and they offer varying amounts of storage. The IDrive Personal plan gives you a 5TB or 10TB storage limit at a price tag of $79.50 or $99.50 per year, respectively, which is quite reasonable. The Personal plan also gives you unlimited devices (perfect if you want to backup multiple devices).

If 10TB isn’t enough for you, you might be in need of an unlimited storage provider, like Backblaze or Carbonite (read our IDrive vs Backblaze and IDrive vs Carbonite comparisons to see how they stack up). If that’s the case, you can 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 up front. This is a bit of a drawback, especially if you’re not convinced that you’ll want to stick with the service that long.

IDrive Business Pricing

IDrive also offers two different business backup plans with a wide range of storage caps. The Team plan ranges from $99.50 per year for 5TB for five users on five devices, to $1999.50 per year for 100TB for 100 users on 100 devices.

The Business plan covers an unlimited number of devices and an unlimited number of users. Storage prices start at $99.50 per year for 250GB and go all the way up to $11,599.50 per year for 50TB of cloud backup space. This plan is the only one that gives you a monthly payment option, though it only applies to storage plans of 1.25TB and above.

The IDrive Business tiers give you a degree of scalability and cost control for your business. The pay monthly option costs around 20 percent more than the annual plans, but allow you to leave at any time.

The scalability you get with IDrive is great for small businesses, but it can’t quite compare with a cloud-file hosting tool that lets you pay for exactly the amount of storage you use. 

Besides offering more storage space, these plans offer business-specific features. Both plans offer SSO integration, user management and industry standard compliance (including HIPAA compliance). Furthermore, the Business plan lets you backup entire servers, which explains the high price tag.

Ease of Use

IDrive’s user 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 desktop client. Both the web interface and mobile app are similarly well designed and easy to work with.

Configuring the Desktop App

The desktop app 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.”

Backup

Here you can choose which files or folders to backup, monitor the progress of the backup and switch between backing up to your IDrive account or a local device.

Restore

The “restore” tab gives you an overview of all your devices and 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 that were backed up before a certain date, and click “view trash” to find deleted items.

Scheduler

Here 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.

Sync

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.

Server Backup

“Server backup” 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.

Settings

Here 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 — it even lets you initiate a backup or restore action remotely. If you have the private key enabled, you must enter it every time you access the web interface.

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 the photos that you have yet to backup to the cloud, as well as a backup button to quickly transfer them to your IDrive online storage space.

The timeline feature for photos and videos is also accessible from the mobile app, as are all of your synchronized folders. The “access” and “restore” tabs show you all of your devices, which you can then click on to view and download 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 incredibly rich functionality when it comes to its core purpose of backing up your devices to the cloud. You can backup data 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.

Managing Your IDrive Backup

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.

Cloud Backup Options

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. 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 large files and changes.

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.

IDrive Backup Types

If you’re having nightmarish visions of a crashed disk and want a full backup of your system, IDrive has just the solution. It lets you create disk images (clones of your hard drive) by clicking the “disk image backup” button in the desktop client.

You can make disk images of either a complete system or just a single drive; depending on the size, it could take days or even weeks to complete. Be sure to check our article, just in case you experience an IDrive backup failure.

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. Android devices get a little more love, as the Android client also lets you backup music files, 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.

IDrive Express

To deal with extremely long upload times, IDrive offers a courier backup service called IDrive Express. This involves receiving an external drive from IDrive by mail, performing a local backup to the external drive, then physically shipping the drive back 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 dramatically speed up your backup, especially for your initial upload.

Speed

IDrive has had significant problems with its transfer speeds in the past, and it’s always been the one caveat whenever we recommend the service, despite it being our favorite online backup provider out there.

However, speed and performance can change over time, and that was what we found when we redid our speed tests for IDrive. To check its connection speeds, we uploaded and downloaded a 5GB folder two times each and then averaged out the results. The folder itself is filled with dozens of different file types of varying sizes and the connection has a stable speed of 100 Mbps in both directions.

IDrive Speed Test Results

With our testing conditions, the fastest a service could possibly do the transfers is in six minutes and 40 seconds. Given this, IDrive did pretty well. Although it’s certainly not the fastest online backup or cloud storage out there, it’s only about a minute slower than expected for uploads and 45 seconds slower for downloads.

Out of all the different online backup providers we’ve tested, IDrive’s download result is exactly the same as the median, and the upload is several minutes faster. All in all, this is a pleasant surprise from IDrive, as the service seems to have managed to clear up its one major flaw.

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 spare. Although we won’t spend time in this article detailing how the encryption algorithm works, you can check out our description of encryption if you want to learn more.

Private Encryption Key

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.

Other IDrive Security Features

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 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 theft 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 services, IDrive collects some personal information on its users. This includes your first and last name, payment details, as well as physical and email 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 its service, as well as share it with trusted third parties that work with IDrive to provide its services (such as payment processing companies).

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 acts, such as the Patriot Act or PRISM.

Is IDrive Zero-Knowledge?

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

Support

We can’t fault IDrive’s customer service, as it manages to provide everything you need in terms of customer and tech support. If you need help with IDrive’s product, there are a number of ways for you to go about getting it, from phone support to an extensive FAQ page.

IDrive Support Options

IDrive offers support in an impressive variety of ways, including:

• FAQ
• Chat support
• Email support
• Phone support
• Support form submission

Before you decide to contact support, make sure your question hasn’t already been answered in IDrive’s extensive FAQ section. It includes answers to the most common questions, organized into categories for easier navigation.

Contacting the Customer and Tech Support Team

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, phone support is only available during the scheduled hours, which might be problematic depending on your time zone.

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 cloud backup service that’s rich in features — both in terms of online backup and cloud storage — with excellent privacy, security and customer support.

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 online file storage space on all of the plans. Plus, there’s a free 30-day trial if you want to try the service first.

If you’re interested in IDrive’s IaaS service, be sure to read our IDrive e2 review to learn more.

What do you think of our review of IDrive? Is the cheap price and incredible functionality enough to sway you, or is the lack of unlimited storage a deal breaker? If you feel like we didn’t do a good enough job, feel free to leave your own personal IDrive reviews in the comment section below. As always, thank you for reading.