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We tested iDrive on the free Basic tier, which offers 10 GB of storage.
Jim Salter
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Thanks to years of advertising, Carbonite is probably the best-known cloud backup service. Provides “unlimited” backup storage on a single PC.
Jim Salter
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I hadn’t heard of Arq until I took a Twitter poll to see what my fellow Technorati were using. At $60/year for 1 terabyte of storage, it’s a little pricey.
Jim Salter
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Backblaze is another very popular backup service. That’s thanks to “unlimited” backup space and the company’s annual hard drive reliability report.
Jim Salter
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The Spideroak One is more expensive than we like.
Jim Salter
If there’s one rule of computing that every system administrator preaches, it’s to always back up important data. Unfortunately, even among system administrators, this rule is often preached more than it’s practiced — backups tend to be a slow and tedious task, and (desperately) necessary. ignored for years until .
Luckily, backups don’t have to be a hassle. And there are many relatively low-cost, easy-to-use cloud services that make it easy to protect your data. The five services described in this article (Carbonite, Arq, iDrive, Spideroak One, and Backblaze) are cloud-based, inexpensive, and work seamlessly in the background.
what we are looking for
For a backup service to work, it must be easy to install and use. Beyond ease of use, our preferred solution should be affordable and have a simple billing model. It should also work reliably in the background, be easy to restore, and provide archival depth. This means that you should have a backup of the previous version of the file in addition to the currently stored copy.
We also tested each backup service for backup and restore speed, but this was not the primary consideration. For most people, backup speed isn’t a big issue for day-to-day use, but if you’re new to cloud-based backup services, high throughput means it can take up to a week to complete your first full backup. Means there is a difference of 6 months between. We were also interested in additional features such as cross-platform support (test platform is Windows 10) and end-to-end encryption.
iDrive: Top Picks in the Ars Archive
I found iDrive to be the clear winner among the five cloud backup services I tested, and ticked every box on the list.
- Easy to install and use
- Fast backup speeds (compared to other cloud providers)
- Continuous backups (which actually work fine) and scheduled backups
- End-to-end encryption keeps your backups safe from prying eyes
- Archive depth (as file versioning) for easy access to older versions of files
- Advanced options for advanced users — SQL, Exchange, Oracle, Sharepoint, VMWare, Hyper-V, System Cloning, etc.
- Aggressively cross-platform — Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS are all supported
- Reasonable and predictable “personal” pricing — $60/year for 5 TB, regardless of device count
- Totally free “basic” tier offering 10 GB with no credit card required. This means you can test your service without any hassle.
- Option to back up to local media and cloud storage
We detail how we tested each service and how iDrive performed in those tests. The only caveat is that iDrive doesn’t cater to data hoarders looking for unlimited backup space, but even that caveat is a recommendation. iDrive’s estimated 5TB is many Having caps in place means you don’t run the risk of one day waking up to an email telling you that you’ve “abused” the service and your account will be restricted accordingly. .
