If you want to store your important files off-site, an online backup service is the easiest way to do so. One option is Zoolz BigMind, which offers sophisticated apps and performed well in our upload speed test. However, the service suffers from a high price and limited versioning capabilities. Furthermore, it doesn’t let you use private encryption keys, offer folder syncing, or provide disaster recovery options. We could also do without the barrage of plan upsells across its apps.
How Much Does BigMind Home Cost?
BigMind’s value proposition decreases as you opt for more storage, but it’s respectable at the low end. BigMind’s Standard Personal account costs $35.88 per year for 100GB worth of backup space. It covers three computers and three mobile devices or tablets. Moving up to the $83.88-per-year Family Plan gets you 500GB of storage for three users, covering nine computers and six mobile devices. The top-of-the-line Family Plus HD account ($155.88 per year) increases storage to 1TB and allows up to five users, 15 computers, and an unlimited number of mobile devices. This level also lets you stream your uploaded videos in HD quality (versus SD in all other plans) and includes premium support.
BigMind is one of the few online backup services that offer a permanent free version. The Free plan gives users 1GB of online storage (previously it offered 5GB for free), licenses for three computers and two mobile or tablet devices, and the ability to back up one external drive. The downgrade in storage makes this plan significantly less useful. Note that you don’t get tech support with the free plan. IDrive and OpenDrive offer free versions with 5GB of storage.
Backblaze and Carbonite give you unlimited storage for $60 and $72 per year, respectively, for a single device, though the latter service limits external drive backups to more expensive plans. IDrive’s plans offer the best value: Users get 2TB of storage for $69.50 per year and licenses for an unlimited number of devices.
Zoolz BigMind is available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Some backup services make it unnecessarily difficult to cancel an account, but that is not the case with BigMind. Users can easily delete their account in the Account Settings section of the website.
Security and Privacy
The company says that data is encrypted using 256-bit AES SSL during the transfer and while at rest on its servers. BigMind, however, does not allow you to set up a private encryption key, “due to the need for our AI engines at rest to access the data.” Given that the AI features only appear to apply to photos, it’s unclear why this limitation also exists for every other file type in the backup set. The vast majority of other online backup services PCMag has tested—including Backblaze, Carbonite, and SpiderOak One—all offer a private key option, a security feature we consider essential.
Thankfully, BigMind does support two-factor authentication logins for the web, which should be standard for all online backup services. All you need to do is scan the QR code BigMind generates with your favorite authenticator app, such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator.
BigMind’s privacy policy states that it retains personal information (such as email and address) and passively collected data (such as your IP address). BigMind states that it does not “sell or market the email addresses or other collected personal information,” and that all personal data is used for the “internal purposes of providing the Service, providing support to users, and to improve services.” Note that BigMind will disclose your personal data as necessary to comply with warrants from law enforcement. BigMind operates under the parent company Genie9, which is based in London, UK.
Desktop Interface and Backup Options
I had no issues downloading BigMind’s desktop app, and I appreciate its effective guide for setting up the initial backup. The main screen shows an overview of the current backup status up top, along with three navigation tabs on the bottom: Data Selection, Settings, and Restore (the last of which I discuss in a later section). At the very bottom, BigMind shows how much storage you have left online.
The Data Selection tab offers good flexibility. You use either a Smart Selection screen or a traditional file-tree menu to select data to back up. The Smart Selection option displays a list of common computer folders, such as Desktop, Documents, Music, and Videos. There are more specific options such as Mail, Financial Files, and Ebooks & PDFs too, each with editable fields for included file types. The Financial Files option, for example, looks for files in the Desktop and Documents folders with extensions that pertain to QuickBooks and TurboTax. This functionality is useful if you only want to back up specific file types. However, since these Smart Selections scan the folders you are likely to back up in their entirety anyway, this feature seems redundant. BigMind does not integrate with Windows’ File Explorer or macOS’s Finder; with Carbonite and other services, you can right-click on files to add or remove them from your backup set.
Other features here include the File Filters and Auto Exclude options. File Filters lets you create detailed rules for what file types should or should not be included in your backup. The Auto Exclude menu defines a range of file locations that are not included in the backup. The No Backup Zone folder that BigMind creates on the desktop during the setup is another place to store files you don’t want backed up.
In the Schedule section of the Settings, you can set backups to occur from anywhere between every five minutes and every 24 hours. There are two choices here: Run Every and Perform a Full Scan on all Selections. The latter forces the scan to run in the case that the former scan is interrupted for any reason. Alternatively, BigMind can run on a schedule; simply specify a start and end time for when you want it to run. We prefer a truly continuous backup option that immediately uploads any changes to your backup set, something Backblaze and Acronis True Image offer.
In the Resource Optimization section, you can enable multithreaded uploads or enact throttling rules. BigMind also includes a unique Presentation Mode, which pauses the backup process when you are playing games or watching movies, for example.
The last two notable options in the Settings section are for connection preferences and configuring the Hybrid+ option, which allows you to simultaneously upload files to the cloud and save a copy to a local storage device. Acronis True Image is one of the few other services that bundle local backup capabilities, though it cannot run those processes simultaneously for every backup set.
BigMind does not offer its own mail-based disaster recovery service, as IDrive and Backblaze do, nor does it support folder syncing, as SpiderOak One and Livedrive do. Both are features we look for in online backup services. BigMind also lacks a disk image-backup option, something that is invaluable if you ever need to restore your computer from scratch.
(Editors’ Note: Livedrive is owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
Web Interface
BigMind’s web interface looks modern, but its default view is overly crowded with menus and information. You navigate the interface via a retractable left-hand menu. Menu options include Dashboard (the main screen), Discover, Users, Reports, and Upgrade. Across the top, you get a search bar and a hub for account and billing settings. Preferences are pretty basic: You can update your password, enable two-factor authentication, and specify which IP addresses can establish connections with BigMind.
The Dashboard is packed with modules, such as account information, backup traffic, backup health status, activity stream, and remaining storage. Thankfully, you can turn off some of these modules via the Manage Sections option or rearrange them in whatever order makes sense to you. Some of its standout features are the aforementioned search bar and the full-featured media browsers. I appreciate the depth of the search bar options and, particularly, the ability to narrow a search to certain file types or sizes.
The Discover section is for browsing your backups. On the left-hand side, you can filter by device, file category, file size, or what BigMind calls AI actions (facial and object recognition). The AI actions only apply to photos, and they’re very hit-or-miss. It correctly identified a bird in a branch, but all its guesses for a picture of a fire pit were variants of “a black and white cat sitting on top of a stove.” Dedicated photo-editing software is a better bet for this type of capability.
Sharing files is intuitive in BigMind. You simply mouse over a file and hit the sharing icon. Then you choose whether to send a sharing link directly via email or to copy it for later use. You can also protect the file with a password, enable download notifications, set an expiration date, and prevent the file from being downloaded. These options are just as flexible as those SpiderOak One offers, but much simpler to set up.
The Users panel offers useful information about your account devices. You can even start a backup remotely, assuming that the device in question is online. In testing, this worked as advertised. IDrive and Acronis True Image offer this capability as well. The last section, Reports, lets you dive into the data on your backup sets, including Smart Reports (overview of device protection status), Bandwidth Usage, and Activity Stream (backup and restore logs of all users). These are useful for keeping tabs on the historical backup activity on your account.
Restore Options
The Restore area of BigMind’s desktop app offers an easy way to get files back from the cloud. Simply navigate through the file tree until you find the files you want back. Right-clicking a file brings up a context window where you can select specific versions of a file. For Home users, BigMind only keeps the last 10 file versions, which compares poorly with the policies of other top services. SpiderOak One keeps an unlimited number of file versions forever. IDrive keeps the previous 30 versions and OpenDrive can store up to the last 99.
On the next screen, you can choose where you want to restore the file, as well as specify a restore date range. Another option lets you set preferences for when or if BigMind replaces existing files in the chosen location.
BigMind’s Mobile Apps
I had no trouble downloading the Android app (there’s also an iPhone app) or signing in to my BigMind account on an Android 11 device. The app is aesthetically pleasing, with a basic Material Design and a consistent color scheme. I didn’t encounter any lag or stutters during use. Still, the interface is cluttered, and I would prefer that BigMind scale things back a bit. The app settings are pretty basic, you can schedule automatic backups, customize what notifications appear, and view account info. The mobile app does not let users run backups remotely for other devices linked to an account.
The hidden left-hand menu on the main app screen reveals options for earning more space (as a reward for getting other people to sign up or for reviewing the app) as well as accessing the store. The substantive options here are those for selecting backup data, accessing favorites, and restoring files. BigMind can back up many types of data including contacts, call logs, messages, photos, videos, music, and documents. IDrive lets you back up the same types of data.
The main page is divided into three top-level sections: Discover, Faces & Things, Store, and Dashboard. Discover is where your data lives, while Store annoyingly only exists to push you to upgrade your storage plan. The Faces & Things section is for using the service’s AI-detection tools. One interesting feature is the AI description option for photos (also available on the web). When you click this button, the app scans the photo and generates a likely description.
How Fast Does BigMind Home Upload Files?
For the backup test, I timed how long it took BigMind to upload three separate 1GB file sets and then took the median of those results time. I performed backups over a home Ethernet connection (16Mbps upload). We have limited access to our physical office due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis—we’re working from home like so many other people—so I was not able to use PCMag’s corporate network for testing. Our test device was a Dell Inspiron tower running Windows 10 with a 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM. Your speed test results will likely vary, as differences in available computer resources and network speed will affect performance.
Zoolz BigMind placed third in our tests, with a median upload time of 13:55 (minutes:seconds). IDrive (12:29) and ElephantDrive (12:44) slightly outperformed it. Still, BigMind’s result was several minutes faster than the middle-tier performers, such as SpiderOak One (16:11) and Livedrive (16:54). Upload speed is not the be-all and end-all of online backup services, but fast performance will certainly make the initial and subsequent backup processes less disruptive.
Be Mindful of Limitations
We like Zoolz BigMind’s performance and effective apps, but its versioning capabilities are lackluster and its higher-tier storage plans are on the expensive side. The service is also missing many features we’ve come to expect with online backup services, such as a private encryption key option, a truly continuous backup setting, file syncing, and a disaster recovery option. We recommend Editors’ Choice online backup services IDrive, for its exceptional value, and Acronis True Image, for its excellent set of backup and security features.
If you don’t want to put your data in the cloud, you have other options. Check out our roundups of the best external hard drives and the best local backup software.
