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IBackup Online Backup Review |
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| Geared towards businesses; Exchange and SQL backups; compliance for financial, medical companies | |
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If IBackup sounds similar to IDrive, there's good reason for that. Both are owned by Pro Softnet and use the same software client for backups. At first glance the big difference is the price. IBackup gives you 10GB of storage for $9.95. That's a dollar per megabyte, and considerably more expensive than its sister service (which gives you 150GB for $4.95 per month). 10GB was just enough for our test computer which is light on the multimedia. Anyone who has even a small collection of videos and photos will burn through this in no time, requiring an upgrade.
Our experience with IBackup's software varied very little from its implementation on IDrive. By default it is more conservative, only backing up once per day, versus IDrive's diligent hourly backups. All of this is configurable, of course; you can set it up for a frequency anywhere between monthly and hourly. Things get a little more interesting when you look at IBackup's online file access. The slowness we complained about with IDrive's web-based control panel is absent here, as are the lack of sharing options. You can share individual files or folders, and apply a host of options including link expiration, password control, write-access, and max number of downloads. We're not sure why IBackup chooses not to share this functionality with IDrive, but it would have improved our impression of the latter. IBackup's real business is its Enterprise solutions. Also running at about a dollar per gigabyte, IBackup's business-level services help business backup their MS SQL server databases and Exchange servers. They also boast support for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), SEC, NASD, HIPAA, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley compliance. It's hard to recommend IBackup to the average user, mostly because of the cost. IDrive is a better deal with the same software, and services like Carbonite and Mozy offer even cheaper prices for unlimited storage. While we like its web interface well enough, it's just too expensive. IBackup also lacks any kind of free trial. However, businesses, particularly those in the legal, health, or financial fields, will want to give IBackup serious consideration. It's the only online backup service we've reviewed so far that offers you assistance in making sure enterprise storage is compliant with federal regulations. |
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| Free Trial: | No |
| Paid Storage Fees: | $9.95-$299.95/mo; $99.50-$2999.50/yr |
| Gigabytes (GB) of Storage Included: | 10GB-300GB |
| File Access Options: | Access and share files from any computer's web browser |
| System Compatibility: | Windows Vista, XP, 2000 Mac OS X 10.4 or above |
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