Hands on: IDrive Business review
This review first appeared in issue 359 PC Professional Edition.
I’m a great promoter of business Cloud backup A solution for SMBs worried about hidden costs, as their subscriptions are based solely on cloud capacity. Available in a variety of flexible plans, you can start small and scale up when needed.
Prices start at £56 per year for 250GB and £838 per year for 5TB, with options up to 50TB and above. It’s even more attractive because all plans include unlimited workstation and server support, so you can protect Windows, macOS and Linux desktops, iOS and android phone, Windows Server, Hyper-V and VMware hosts and business applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Oracle.
IDrive’s hybrid backup can protect data to a local drive or network share, offers apps for protecting Qnap and Synology NAS devices, and offers disk image backup, cloning, and continuous data protection (CDP), so the features keep coming. Cloud file synchronization between IDrive computers is also included, and subscriptions provide an equal amount of sync space.
The only optional feature is cloud-to-cloud (C2C) backup service Google workspace and Microsoft 365. These are managed through a dedicated portal, with the MS365 component costing £16 per user per year to protect OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint and Teams accounts.
Client deployment is simple: You send an email invitation from the portal, which provides users with links to create backup accounts, select AES-256 encryption, and download the desktop application. Businesses with remote workers will find a lot to like here, as the price includes unlimited users, and administrators can remotely access their desktop applications, create or edit backup jobs, set up schedules and run recovery tasks.
The client opens with a default backup set of common files and documents. We modify file and folder sources by adding or removing them in the Backup pane and schedule tasks regularly. Files and folders can be easily recovered using local agents or web portals, and IDrive provides Ransomware protection Keep up to 30 file versions.
To secure our VMware ESXi virtual machines (VMs), we provided the IP address and credentials of the vCenter host and selected the VM from the list displayed. Jobs run a mix of local and cloud backups by default, and for the former, IDrive can use storage locations or mapped drives on the system where the application is running.
The same process applies to protecting local SQL Server databases, while Exchange Server and Hyper-V VM backups require the desktop application to be installed directly on the host. When restoring data to any of these hosts, IDrive needs access to the local backup folder, if that folder is not available you can download it from cloud storage Use a client or portal.
this Microsoft The 365 Protection Service is equally easy to use; as soon as we authorized access to our account, it immediately began a full backup of the four suite components and all users. The dedicated portal can be accessed directly from the main IDrive web console or desktop application and provides an overview of all activities and protected projects.
You have no control over the schedule, as IDrive automatically runs incremental backups three times a day, but you can run additional manual backups for selected users and teams at any time. The portal’s recovery panel is easy to use and we can easily find and recover items such as Outlook users’ emails, OneDrive files, and Teams documents.
IDrive Business is the premier cloud backup option for small and medium-sized businesses that want to protect on-premises systems and remote workers. Platform and business application support are excellent, easy to use, and the simple capacity-based subscriptions are great value.
