Interview with IDrive

IDrive is a very complete online backup provider offering various solutions that work for different types of users. Whether you’re a home user looking to backup family pictures, music and other personal data, or a business user looking to store either important business data or full server backups – IDrive has just the plan for you. The company shines with its IDrive Express service that lets you transfer your data onto a 3TB physical hard drive that IDrive will then upload to your secured cloud backup space, so you don’t have to spend days and lots of bandwidth on your initial backup. This feature, along with the many backup features and great customer support, is just one of the reasons we had a great experience with this backup service when reviewing it.

Keen to learn more about this company, we invited IDrive’s Shane Bingham for an interview. He proudly tells us more about the cross-platform capabilities of IDrive that especially shine on mobile devices, upcoming releases related to IDrive Express and the company’s latest DataCenter Edition feature.

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role in the IDrive team?

I’m our company’s Business Development Coordinator, which is a long title for ‘guy who wears a lot of hats’. From event planning, to advertising, to social media and managing our reseller programs, I have my hands in a little bit of everything here at IDrive. I really enjoy having a lot of different things to do every day. I started in our Support team about 3 years ago, and moved into my current position at the start of last year.

Why should we take backups of our smartphone and tablet, even when software like iTunes takes backups of the device in iCloud or locally on our computer?

We’re all generating and storing a lot more data on our mobile devices than we were just a couple of years ago. Pictures, movies, contacts are all being generated at an exponential rate. Local backups and platform specific services like iCloud are a great start, but what makes IDrive particularly useful is cross-platform backup and restore capabilities. That way, if you ever upgrade or switch over to another brand, migrating your data is just a couple of taps away.

Why should we choose IDrive and not another online backup provider?

IDrive can backup an unlimited number of devices on every account. Most other online backup services limit backups to one PC or Mac per account. These days, the average household has over 5 Internet-connected devices, so we feel per device plans are not the way people will want to manage their data now and in the future.

IDrive is the only service that offers a full-featured cross platform backup for mobile devices with the private key option. IDrive is one of the few services that offers features like our Rewind function for bulk data restore to a previous state. This is useful when data is corrupted by crypto-virus or a derivative of that. These are just few unique functionalities that IDrive offers. Our features page has even more!

How do you make your service suitable for both personal and professional online backups, and for server backups?

Our focus is on providing an easy-to-use interface, with the flexibility to go deeper and customize your service for advanced users and businesses. For example, when you first launch IDrive, the most commonly backed up folders (Pictures, Documents, Videos, etc.) are pre-selected, and an off-hours daily backup is automatically scheduled for you. If you do nothing else, many of your most important personal files will automatically be backed up. If you want more flexibility, you can customize your backup set, schedule, and set up things like cut-off times and notifications, so you are in complete control of your backups. Our business plans also feature advanced backups, like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, to give businesses the ability to protect data stored on their servers, and not just workstations.

What is the newly released IDrive DataCenter Edition?

IDrive DataCenter Edition is a new graphical interface for Linux distros. It’s web-based, so you can access your controls from anywhere, which makes managing backups easy for DataCenter professionals. Other Linux enthusiasts can also take advantage of the service, which is also available for any of our IDrive plans.

What is your favorite feature in IDrive?

That would probably be our cross-platform restore for mobile devices. I’m considering switching between iOS and Android, and the prospect of having to re-enter all of my contacts would be daunting. But with IDrive, I just install the app on my new phone, hit ‘Restore’ and everything is immediately downloaded and integrated into my new phone.

Which data security and productivity tips do you have for people, other than using an online backup service of course?

Don’t forget to dust! Physical device failures are a common cause of data loss, and you’d be surprised how much damage can be done to a computer by build up inside the tower. Get a can of compressed air, and clean out those fans!

Is an iPad optimized IDrive app something that is in the works?

It’s something we’d like to have available in the future, our current design is functional, but doesn’t take as much advantage of the iPad screen as we’d prefer. But I don’t have a specific timeline to share.

What does IDrive have in store for the near future?

We’ve got some exciting releases planned for early next year, right now all I can say it’s related to, but not quite the same as our IDrive Express service, which helped people speed up their initial uploads with a physical hard drive.