IDrive Review
Introducing iDrive
iDrive are not exactly the most notorious cloud storage provider out there, but they are professional and they offer great services at decent prices.They are owned by ProSoftNet Corp. which started out as a Canadian software consulting company for Fortune 500 giants.
They also own another cloud service provider, iBackup, so they are not necessarily small potatoes in the cloud space.
Features And Signing Up
Besides a free 5GB account, iDrive offers a wide array of premium plans , and it is one of their strong points. They cover most, if not all types of customers and their needs.
For this review we opted for the iDrive Pro : Family wich costs 14.95 $ per month / 149.50 $ per year and offers :
- 500 GB Storage
- Unlimited Cloud Sync Between Multiple Devices
- Multiple Sub-Accounts
- File Versioning – 30 versions
- Mobile Access For Ipad/Iphone/Android
User Interface And Ease Of Use
iDrive puts heavy emphasis on functionality rather than style or ease of use. Their desktop app is so packed with features that its sometimes confusing.
If you are light computer user you will probably have to dedicate a couple of hours to learn the interface, but if you know how to use advanced file managers like Filezilla for example (i know its an FTP client) you will feel right at home with the Windows iDrive client.
The web App on the other hand is more user friendly, very similar to the one DropBox uses.
The mobile apps are user friendly as well, and these are also far more stylish in design, especially the Iphone and Ipad ones, they blend seamlessly with the phone, unlike the windows app which runs as a separate process from your explorer.
Security
We found it comforting to know that iDrive is run by a large software company and it shows in their security infrastructure.
All connections use 256 Bit AES and are encrypted in their data centers by your personal encryption key, which you will create on sign up.
The encryption key is stored on your side, in the same way Fire fox Sync works.
If you wish to use the default iDrive encryption key you can do that as well , i personally used the default one since i tend to forget/misplace stuff.
Customer And Technical Support
One of iDrive’s strong points is their customer support.
Unlike other providers who barely feature a phone line for select countries, iDrive has Live Chat, phone lines for US and Non-US countries and of course email.
I chatted with the live support for about 10 minutes, asking generic questions, they are knowledgeable enough for generic questions (billing and small how to) but once i became more technical about the service, i was told to give them a phone call.
Customer Support is stellar, Tech Support is decent.
In Closing
iDrive is a great service for most needs, either personal or business. It covers all the feature check marks for both the desktop and mobile apps, and it has great security options .
Don’t forget to leave your own review or comment bellow.
Doesnt play well with non-alphanumeric characters - iDrive
I've used iDrive for a couple of weeks so far, and while the offering is very good, I've found that the software really does not cope well with file or folder names that contain non-alphanumeric characters such as apostrophe, forward slash and colon. What tends to happen is these characters affect the path of files or folders that contain them, and then file not found errors crop up.
This means that if you have a photo called "John's birthday", iDrive has a problem when it comes to cleaning the archive. If you have a folder called "02/08/2013", then iDrive cannot find any files within this folder. The same occurs on Mac if you use "02:08:2013".
Frankly, this is poor. There's even an error message referring to non-alphanumeric characters that crops up in the log which suggest you zip them first. Huh? In a lot of cases that might not be possible or even desirable to have to deal with the inadequacies of the programmer that wrote the backup software.
Fix these problems and iDrive would be worth recommending. Unfixed, I couldn't recommend this software as it could leave some of your files without a backup.
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