In my last post about my horrendous experience with Carbonite, I said that I was trying out a new backup solution called IDrive. I have been playing around with the free account (limit of 5gb) for a day and I really like the configuration options of the service. I was going to give it a few weeks, and gradually increase the upload sizes to see if it was worth the $59.50 a year for 1tb of storage. While I know that Carbonite had unlimited storage, when it comes down to it, 1tb is more then enough for my needs. Hell, the internal drive on my iMac is only 1tb!
So I get an email from IDrive this afternoon with a special 24hr offer. Their offer was a 75% discount to upgrade my account from free to the 1tb plan. That means 1 year would cost me $14.99. Needless to say I bought a year’s subscription for that price as I’d be stupid not to, especially with Carbonite giving me a full refund!
So I’ve configured IDrive to do a full backup of my photos and music starting at 3:30am every night. Everyone will be in bed by that point and there should be no bandwidth problems. The nice thing too is that if I find that there is an issue with bandwidth, not only can I throttle the bandwidth inside of IDrive, but I can set a cut-off time when the backup should stop. I really love this configuration option. Plus just like Carbonite, I can set it to a continuous real-time backup if I need to. I really don’t see a need as a nightly off site backup and hourly Time Machine backups seem paranoid enough for me.
Edit: I just downloaded the mobile IDrive app for my iPhone. It will automatically backup my photos, videos, calendars, and contacts on my phone to my remote drive. Awesome!!
