IDrive review: an excellent app handling local and internet backups

There’s something to be said for a good backup utility that handles both local and web/cloud-based backups. We’ve been running through the best cloud-based storage services for your Mac, and while many of them are ideal for sharing files or documents, some offer full backup solutions for Mac.

IDrive stands on that line, offering not only the ability to recall a specific file, but also tools to continually backup your entire drive to the cloud while also letting you drag and drop files a la Google Drive.

It’s a potent mix that makes for a great app, and while the web side of things could be slicker (see also, iCloud Drive), a staggering number of payment options for varying team sizes and the option of backing up Office 365 and Google Workspace data as well might just make this a perfect option for enterprises.

The software offers a wide degree of support, and requires Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan or later to install and run.

Price

The subscription-based tier system offers a free Basic account with 10GB of online disk space for free with no credit or debit card required. That 10GB free tier allows for local backups and is pretty generous, but the real steal is the $2.95 per year IDrive Mini plan. That’s not a typo, either; for less than 3 bucks a year you can get access to 100GB of storage. That can be expanded to 500GB for $9.95 per year. That drastically undercuts even Google’s solid pricing options for Drive.

The IDrive Personal account supports one user, multiple computers, and offers 5TB of online storage at $69.95 for the first year, and full details as to account offerings and pricing can be found on IDrive’s website. If you opt for the Personal plan you can use IDrive for multiple devices – there’s no limit per account.
 
All of that combines for a very affordable service for backing up just about anything, and all of it is encrypted, too.

First impressions

Once you’ve downloaded and installed IDrive, created an account, and assigned permissions to your Mac’s hard drive and file locations, you’re set. 

The app immediately began backing up key files on my Mac, including my Documents and Pictures folders, and did so without needing any guidance – although you can get as granular as you need to.
 
The option to create a local backup could be really handy if you’re not keen on Time Machine, and IDrive will let you restore files from your account, a local spot on your disk, or by ordering a drive from the company with your data on it – ideal as a last resort.

Features

Whether you’re using the free plan or paying for IDrive, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s an ideal Mac citizen. It sits nicely in the background, quietly going about its business, and offers a whole bunch of options within the menus which are easy to use.

Users can drag and drop to a Finder window to share files with ease, and there’s an optimization option to slow things down if you’re asking more of your Mac. Backups can be scheduled, files can be excluded from them, and an Archive Cleanup tool maximizes your cloud storage by matching items 1:1 to delete that you don’t have on your Mac anymore, ensuring you’re not cluttering it up with old files.

All in all, there’s just about every option available and it’s all easy to parse, with a single button to click to open a log of data.

Where IDrive shines is in its reliability and scope of platform support. It’s simple to work with HFS+, APFS, FAT, NTFS, exFAT, and other file formats, and create cross-platform backups. As expected, it’s also easy to customize inclusion and exclusion lists and specify which files are backed up and which ones are left alone.

The software is reliable, and even if its natural instinct is to grab all available bandwidth it can find from your internet connection and use this, it was able to get over 755 gigabytes up to a cloud server in about 14 hours during my initial test (the bandwidth can be readily customized as needed so you don’t cripple device connections around your home or office). Quick access to support videos can be found at www.idrive.com/videos, which can come in handy for new users.

As is IDrive’s tradition, the company still offers its IDrive Express program, in which IDrive will send along a hard drive for you to borrow, whereupon you can back up the data, ship it back to the company via a prepaid box, and IDrive will place the data on their servers for you. This becomes that much more useful if dozens or hundreds of terabytes of data need to be backed up and there’s only so much available time or bandwidth to work with. Technical questions were answered quickly by IDrive’s staff, and features like the scheduler and local and online backups and the file restore functions went off without a hitch during testing.

Problems

It seems churlish to nitpick with such excellent value on offer, but I found the web app side of IDrive to be much slower than more dedicated file-sharing options like Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud Drive. A couple of times I had to refresh the page as it slowed to a crawl, and the design looks a little dated for my tastes – although that could be a more personal thing.
I will admit, though, that the variety of sharing options (download limits, time limits, and optional password protection) are very welcome.

While IDrive does a good job of conveying a task’s progress via a classic progress bar and counter for the number of items successfully copied, an elapsed time counter and/or estimated time remaining counter might help give the user a better idea of how long a task has taken and how much longer it might be in progress so they can better plan their next copy. Granted, this comes down to the company’s design aesthetic, and they might not want to overwhelm the user with information.

Arguably more important top address is a strange bug I found during testing in which IDrive requests permission to access the full contents of your hard drive. This is to be expected on the macOS, and while it has you drag an application icon to the Privacy settings, this doesn’t seem to be immediately effective and the action had to be performed more than once. During my tests, this action eventually granted permission to my Documents and Desktop folders while initially denying this. The bug eventually sorted itself out, but this struck me as odd.

Should you buy IDrive?

Permissions bug aside, there’s an excellent suite of tools to be had with IDrive. The app handles both local and internet backups well, the IDrive Express program is a nice feature, and the simple fact is that IDrive provides a ton of online backup space for a good price. The customization is good, it’s easy to specify files to copy and those to ignore, and it’s hard to argue with the final result. That being said, IDrive is definitely worth your attention, and here’s hoping they keep this up in the years to come.

IDrive stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Backblaze in the cloud backup space. While it’s perhaps not as conducive to quick file-sharing as Google Drive, it goes above and beyond with a multitude of options and subscription plans for ensuring your data stays where you can reach it.