This post is sponsored by IDrive-E. IDrive-E is a supplier of online backup services. I have been getting interested in online backup suppliers over the last couple of months and have reviewed a couple of them as well. IDrive is one of the leading suppliers and offers free backup space up to 2GB without any kind of bandwidth or file restrictions. This could be pictures, documents, or even music. They also offer the option to upgrade to the paid plan, IDrive-E Pro as well. The pro plan is only $4.95 a month or $49.50 a year and offers unlimited storage space.
I went ahead and signed up for the free plan for the time being so that I could check it out. Sign-up is easy, Name, user name, password, email address, and a captcha gets you started at which point you download the application, which is about 7 megs. The install ran pretty much flawlessly under Windows Vista. During the install you pick an encryption password with which your files will be encrypted, so don’t forget it as you won’t be able to recover your files without it.
After you have picked the password it will prompt you to restart your computer. It’s not required to use the IDrive-E interface but if you want to use mapped drives and Windows Explorer it is. Using the IDrive interface is fairly easy. You just pick the files that you want to backup, and either schedule a backup, or tell it to backup right now. I went ahead and did a manual backup and decided to store some pictures. I am sure that I have more than two gigs of photos on this computer but will store as many as I can. Here’s a shot of the main interface.
Once I picked Backup Now it scans the files…
…and then starts the Online Backup. Apparently I did have less than two gigs. I had forgotten that I have not put all of my pictures back on here since I rebuilt my PC earlier in the year…
Overall it is a pretty cool service and a nifty companion app. I am considering signing up for the pro service. I am interested in seeing how well I can access my media files online as I may install this on my media center. I have close to 800Gb of videos and movies and it would be nice to be able to free up some of that space here. If it’s fast enough I may just use them via a mapped drive.