IDrive Personal Cloud Backup Review: Best Overall

[Guest]

IDrive is best for anyone who has multiple machines to back up. Just keep an eye on the 2TB or 5TB storage limit.

IDrive Personal Cloud Backup Review: Best Overall : Read more

 

[emarhiggins]

IDrive has a fraudulent billing department and the kind of customer support that some dark comedies are built on. Two years ago, I canceled my monthly subscription. A year after that they tried to charge an annual fee for me. Billing and support refused work with me to shut it down. They wanted me to login. I did not have the password, and they would not help me reset it. I understand security issues ... There has to be a better way. I ultimately worked with the Credit Card company to mark the charge as fraudulent, providing them with numerous emails to show my activity to work with them.

 

[Doh_123]

I'm a current IDrive user and have one major issues with it. Every time I create a new file I have to bring up the backup software interface to add it to my backup. And when I remove a file, I need to remove it from my backup list, or the backup will again fail. I really don't want to have to deal with incremental cloud backup at this level, I want it to be transparent and just work (like Carbonite and CrashPlan did).

I also have been trained by the IDrive software to look at the logs at least once a day. The one or two times I didn't do that, the backup had been failing for a week, and I hadn't noticed. That's NOT the kind of transparency that I want. If the backup fails, I need to know about it ASAP so that I can fix it. There's no telling when one's computer might fail, and that's what backup is for.

Anyways, I cannot recommend IDrive, it's the worst backup I've ever used. Just waiting for a chance to replace it. Both CrashPlan and Carbonite were better, they just worked in the background, and I didn't feel that I needed to be monitoring them all the time. When I added a file, it went into my backup by default, and when I removed a file it didn't cause the backup to fail. I could not pay attention to my backup, and it would be working an intact when I needed it. That's what incremental cloud backup is all about for me.

 

[pdg.blitz]

It's all very well reviewing a product like iDrive from a TECHNICAL point of view, but what about whether it actually works in practice? What about it's customers? What do they think? Well if you take a look on Trustpilot you will find that iDrive has an ABYSMAL rating by customers - giving a "Trustscore" of just 1.6 out of 10. Yes that' right. ONE POINT SIX.

The reviews - all 128 of them - make harrowing reading. Before using iDrive, I would suggest that any potential user takes a look at these, and the various reasons why actual users fell the product is poor or worse still left them high and dry after a data loss incident.

I downloaded iDrive AND PAID FOR IT on the basis of the special discount offered here - 80% discount for year 1 - and it was only after 3 days that found that the "Continuous Data Protection" (CDP) was not actually doing anything and my new files were not being backed up!. The reason? iDrive was slowly backing up an external drive (used for pics and video files) for the last 3 days, and the software did not have the common sense to pause this backup to squeeze in backups of my new or changed "live" files before continuing with the external drive. Left to its own devices I would have no CDP protection for maybe weeks, until the external drive had eventually finished its initial backup!

Worse still, iDrive did not warn me of this. And YES I have set up email alerts of backup fail and also checked my spam box.

Coupled with the way that iDrive works with DELETED and MOVED files and folders, and the nightmare this could give you in a restore situation (learned via Trustpilot from customers having do this in real life), I have decided to sacrifice my $14 paid (a small price to pay) and go for a different back solution. Either Crashplan (shame they have ditched the consumer version service) or back to good old external drives (just more of them and spread around different locations) plus maybe using Syncback and FTP .

 

[Doh_123]

It's all very well reviewing a product like iDrive from a TECHNICAL point of view, but what about whether it actually works in practice? What about it's customers? What do they think? Well if you take a look on Trustpilot you will find that iDrive has an ABYSMAL rating by customers - giving a "Trustscore" of just 1.6 out of 10. Yes that' right. ONE POINT SIX.

The reviews - all 128 of them - make harrowing reading. Before using iDrive, I would suggest that any potential user takes a look at these, and the various reasons why actual users fell the product is poor or worse still left them high and dry after a data loss incident.
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Okay, so I went to Trustpilot and looked at the reviews for all the online backup companies. Trustpilot gets pretty much only negative user reviews...seems to be the place to go and complain when you've had problems. Either there isn't a good backup company in the bunch (which could be), or people with good experiences don't bother to post on Trustpilot. There were a few good reviews of any of these online backup solutions, but very few. Can't argue with the poster's experiences, they're their experiences. But given how many people are using a product like IDrive, this is a small sample of the actual user pool, and no telling what their level of understanding of how a program like this operates and is used is.

For me, I've made my peace, at least temporarily, with IDrive. It is functional, our backups do get completed and I've restored from them. Myabe because we only have around 100GB. of storage backed up. But I do have to do a lot more monitoring than I'd like. Creating or downloading a file and then subsequently deleting it an hour or so later will cause backup failures until you run "verifiy" manually. Just deleting a file can cause the same sort of failures, again, until you manually run "verify". Shouldn't have to give a background "continuous backup" product this much baby sitting. Neither CrashPlan (only business now) or Carbonite (expensive for multiple computers) required anywhere near this much monitoring. Those both worked well for me, and you should see their reviews on Trustpilot *smile*...terrible products according to the users posting there. All I can say is that their experiences don't jibe with mine.

By the way, I tried Acronis as well, free trial, and it's just a mess. If you want to spend your life on it you can most likely get it working, very difficult to configure. And the continuous backup options are limited and complicated, and quite difficult to keep running. Continuous backup in the background is what I'm looking for, look elsewhere for that.

Anyways, while I have no particular reason to stay with IDrive for any period of time and several reasons to move on, I'll most likely stay with them a while now that we understand each other *smile*. FIrst thing I have to do when I turn on my computer is to check IDrive's backup logs to be sure that my backups are working...they're usually working, mainly because I pay so much attention to them.

 

[joe_w]

I'm a long time user who was stuck on a legacy version of the app with a legacy plan. Their current plans offer a lot more space so I upgraded, which required upgrading the app also. Not possible to use the old version against a new plan.

This was a terrible mistake. Their current version simply would not work in my Windows 10 environment even though the legacy version had worked fine for years in that environment.

iDrive support was lacklustre and largely uninterested, clearly reading blindly from a script with zero engagement. Their suggestions started at useless and raised to the ridiculous.

Just to make things even more fun for me there were attempts to continue to charge me for my old plan despite my cancelling it to migrate to the new plan. Their cancellation process is deceptive and has many stages where it looks like you've cancelled but haven't completed it yet.

iDrive 6.7.x on Windows 10 simply doesn't work at all. Even on a backup set consisting of one 1Kb file it would hang for 12+ hours on "preparing file set".

DO NOT BUY.

 

[Dajester]

Beware, iDrive is an absolute scam. They will get you in with promises of a good deal and then kick you in the jimmy if you are over even a few GB with an exorbadant overcharge. There is no option to cap your usage, and there is essentially no warning that you are over. I got an email saying I was over and even though I removed the excessive data overage was still charged ~$150 for ~100GB of overage that I had. Steer clear of this shady company.