My friend IDrive
A few years ago after I experienced numerous hard drive failures and almost losing my entire photo collection I decided to invest in an online backup strategy. After evaluating a few options, I decided to go with IDrive and I have been extremely happy.
It costs about $4.95 per month for 150 GB of storage. One thing to note is that each file can have up to 30 different versions and the versioned files do not count against your storage limit.
The versioned files saved me a few months back when my hard drive become corrupted and all my photos were backed up in a corrupted state. I used the time-line restore feature to restore all my content to a point in time when I knew the files were good.
I basically set it and forget it and I know my photos and documents are safely being backup nightly. They also have an option for continuous backup so as a file changes it automatically backs it up immediately.
For those of you that do not want to upload all your content the first time, they also offer a service called Rapid Serve. For $69 a portable IDrive will be shipped to you and you can fill it up with all your content and send it back to them. Once they receive your portable IDrive all the content will be associated with your account.
The following is a overview of their features:
- Automatic Selection
- Continuous Data Protection
- True Archiving / Sync
- Open / Locked File Backup
- Mapped Drive Backup
- IDrive Explorer
- Search and Restore
- Time-line restore
- Versioning
- Retrieve from any location
- Web based backup management
- Enhanced security with 128-bit SSL encryption on transfers, 256-bit AES encryption on storage with a user defined key that is not stored anywhere on IDrive server.
I cannot recommend IDrive enough to anyone who wants to keep their data safe and offsite.
