IDrive Team looks like just another tier on the IDrive pricing page, which also includes IDrive Personal. However, unlike IDrive’s consumer offerings, this is a full-on business cloud backup solution. It’s not for enterprises, but it’s a good choice for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) as well as distributed workers or teams.
Pro Softnet, maker of IDrive, says its latest offerings are based on talking with its SMB customers to understand how their needs have changed during the pandemic. The result is two new business-class services, IDrive Team and IDrive Business. We’ve chosen to review IDrive Team as it’s most applicable to SMB needs. But while Team combines a good price with a strong feature set, it’s missing some of the more advanced security features found in our Editors’ Choice winner, Acronis Cyber Protect.
IDrive Team gives five users connected to one account 5TB worth of cloud backup. That’s small but makes it easy to manage a team or micro-business instead of juggling five individual accounts. Team can backup Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows PCs, as well as both Apple iOS and Google Android-based mobile devices. Linux is supported, but only through the web console or via scripting. Additionally, your IT staff can both see and manage backups for all those device types remotely.
On the central office side, IDrive supports both external hard disks attached to PCs running the IDrive client, and it can backup network attached storage (NAS) devices, too. All this is managed via a centralized web console that IT staff can access from anywhere. To keep data safe, the company adds built-in data encryption in transit and at rest, 24/7 priority support, and the option to have your data mailed to you on an external hard disk.
IDrive Pricing Options
IDrive has a large menu of services and a range of pricing options encompassing both personal and business use. For business users, IDrive Team goes for $99.50 a year for five users and five computers with 5TB of storage. It can backup every desktop operating platform and handles mobile and small NAS devices, too. IDrive Team has a 10TB plan for larger teams that costs $199.50 for 10 computers and 10 users. A 25TB Team plan costs $499.50 for 25 computers and 25 users, and there’s also a 50TB Team plan costing $999.50 for 50 computers and 50 users. The company discounts the first year, so new signups for IDrive Team pay a reduced subscription price of $74.62 for the first year, representing a 25% discount.
Up from Team is the IDrive Business plan, which costs $199.50 a year but covers unlimited users, computers, and servers. At this tier you can support certain third-party cloud service backups, like Microsoft 365 Exchange, for example. It also has local back office app support for things like on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers or SQL Server databases. There’s also added support for higher capacity NAS devices. Larger businesses, or those with more specific needs, can check out IDrive’s Enterprise tier, though this only has custom pricing. Finally, there’s the IDrive BMR (bare metal recovery) service. This offers solutions for virtual infrastructure and hypervisor environments as well as general cloud service backups and high-end NAS platforms. This is a separate service, but it can be added to any of the other business tiers should customers need it.
If you’re looking to evaluate Team yourself, get set for disappointment. There is no free trial for any IDrive business subscription, which we feel should be changed. Even small IT departments need to evaluate critical software, especially a backup solution, prior to committing.
The IDrive Backup Experience
As mentioned, IDrive Team does a good job covering your bases when it comes to client device types. It can handle all the major desktop and mobile platforms and PC backups are continuous, so your data is saved in near real-time. IDrive keeps the bandwidth usage for this manageable by transmitting only new files and recent changes to existing files. IDrive Team also backs up open files like Microsoft Outlook and Intuit QuickBooks or Quicken for supported platforms, including Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008. There’s an option to backup up mapped external drives, as well as NAS devices. For NAS, however, you’ll need a dedicated client application installed on the device. IDrive has those available for several popular NAS brands, including Asustor, Netgear, QNAP, and Synology.
Accessing IDrive Team starts on the website by entering your account credentials. Once in, you’re asked to download a client onto each device. IDrive calls this a “thin client,” but it’s the backup client software you and your users will employ to configure local settings and initiate backup and restore operations. A good feature here, and one that’s not supported by all its competitors, is the ability to deploy IDrive’s clients via Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy. This lets you download and install the IDrive client on all your PCs simultaneously, whether local or remote. It also means the IDrive client will show up on software audits conducted through Windows Server or Microsoft’s other client management platforms, like the System Center suite.
The IDrive desktop client is well organized and provides quick access to the most critical controls. Links to Backup, Restore, Scheduler, Sync, Server Backup, and Settings are accessible from the menu on the left. There is also an option to clone a hard disk or perform a full system backup below this, so as not to confuse users.
IDrive’s web client is similar to the desktop app, meaning it’s both visually clean and easy to figure out. That’s at least partially because it does a good job of replicating the look and feel of the desktop client. There’s the same blue navigation bar on the left side, which provides links to Cloud Backup, Sync and Cloud Storage, Dashboard, Trash, and Drive Express. IDrive’s overall design looks very modern and its ease of use rivals that of Carbonite Safe Basic Computer Backup and CrashPlan for Business, both good SMB options.
Administration and Restores
For testing, we installed the client on a Windows laptop, though this required us to get administrator privileges before the install could take place. That could present a small hurdle for deploying the client software depending on how your company has set up its employees’ PCs. The desktop client integrates into the Windows taskbar and hovering over the icon with the mouse cursor tells you when your next scheduled backup job will run. Initiating a manual backup or restore is simply two clicks away. We appreciated that IDrive worked silently in the background without slowing the system down or throwing up endless alerts and notifications.
Administrators also have their own app, though it runs solely as a centralized web console. The plus here is that it not only lets the IT staff manage remote clients, the IT staff can be remote as well. The console is well organized, just like the client console, though it has several features the client app doesn’t, notably real-time reporting, remote restores, and the ability to backup files or entire disk images to a secondary location, like a NAS box, as well as to the cloud. What’s missing here is the ability to designate your own cloud storage target, like your Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure account. Though it makes sense that this isn’t an option for continuous backup, higher-end competitors do offer this ability for archiving so your IT staff can build its own tiered storage architecture for added redundancy.
That aside, we found IDrive Team’s restore options nicely transparent and easy to access. Either administrators or users can restore files locally or access them using any browser, which opens up some opportunity for quick-and-dirty collaboration between teams. You can restore files, folders, or entire drives from the web application or from the desktop client. Restoring folders from the cloud to our test PC was quick and trouble-free. Jumping on the web client to grab files from folders was similarly easy and we didn’t experience any lag when accessing individual files.
IDrive customers that prefer to have at least one local copy of all data can avail themselves of the IDrive Express option. This service mails customers an external USB hard drive containing the most recent data snapshot. Subscribers get such a disk three times a year, with subsequent requests costing $59.95. Backblaze Business Backup, is another cloud backup provider that offers a hard-drive-by-mail recovery option. But Backblaze’s Restore by Mail service will not only ship you your files (up to a maximum of 8TB) on a drive anywhere in the world, it also makes this a little more cost effective. If you return the drive within 30 days after your restore, Backblaze refunds you for the service, which costs $99 for a 256GB disk and $189 for an 8TB hard drive.
IDrive Security and Management
Other notable IDrive Team features include the ability to create users and groups for backup operations. This is dedicated to your IDrive system and separate from any users or groups you might have in Active Directory, though you can sync them up. You can also sync files and folders in real time across all devices with universal access to those files and folders via a web browser or mobile device. Note that using this sync functionality will require a separate activation. Sync is a separate service distinct from cloud backup, and it needs to be activated from the desktop or the IDrive web console.
IDrive Team also has priority support for business users on its 24/7 live chat, email, or phone support services. In terms of business compliance, IDrive supports several key regulations, including HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, and SEC / FINRA. In addition, IDrive Team and Business offerings are SOC1- and SOC2-compliant, which means the company adheres to industry best practices for data management. That includes full Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance, which governs electronic record retention for accounting purposes.
On a more general basis, IDrive does a good job of protecting your data. When in transit, IDrive encrypts data using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Once it’s at rest in the cloud, data is guarded by AES 256-bit encryption. However, while that’s fairly solid, many competitors, like our Editors’ Choice winner, Acronis, are going a step beyond simple data encryption and adding cloud-side malware scanning, higher-end encryption, and ransomware protection features, and typically these features are all included as part of the service. So while IDrive will do a baseline job of protecting your data, if data security is especially important to your business, you should explore some of other players in this roundup.
Easy Backup for Small Businesses
Overall, IDrive Team is an affordably priced and comprehensive cloud backup solution for smaller teams. It works well with all key desktop platforms and has deeper support for Microsoft’s back office applications, like Exchange and SharePoint. Business users get 24/7 chat support and the company has a nicely rounded knowledgebase and support video library, too. While it’s not what you’d select for a large organization, IDrive deserves a very close look by smaller companies or distributed teams looking for a dedicated backup solution they can deploy fast.
