IDrive, completely contradicting Mozy‘s move to discontinue unlimited online backups, announced yesterday a new backup plan: IDrive Unlimited. For just $49.50 / year, users can backup as much data as they’d like from 1 Windows-based computer.
How does this compare to IDrive’s other service offerings?
Obviously, storage space is no longer a concern. IDrive’s other plans (IDrive Pro: Personal, Family or Business) limited users as to how much data they could backup. Now, however, users can backup as much data as they can upload.
And there’s the catch: with IDrive Unlimited, your upload speeds are throttled after 150GB, down to 200 Kb/sec. Carbonite, another online backup provider offering unlimited backups with throttled uploads, turns it down to 512 kbps (kilobits per second) after the first 35GB, then down to 100 kbps (kilobits per second) after 200GB.
In addition to the throttle, users of IDrive Unlimited cannot backup mapped drives, and files that are deleted from the user’s PC are deleted from the backup set after 30 days (common amongst unlimited backup providers). Also, IDrive Unlimited backups are, themselves, not backed up. So if you’re looking for a backup of your backup, look at IDrive Pro.
Very interesting move by IDrive, considering Mozy’s recent decision. Currently, the only unlimited backup providers (that we know of) who do not throttle uploads are Backblaze and Crashplan. Will they implement throttling rules soon?
