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IBackup Review: Online Cloud Backup |
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| Geared towards businesses; Exchange and SQL backups; compliance for financial, medical companies | |
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[Editor's note: IBackup offers a 15-day free trial and a 17% discount for subscribers to its annual plans. Customers must pay for a year's worth of service, in order to receive the discount.]
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 100 GB of storage for $9.95, or $8.29/month with the annual plan. IBackup also now offers a mobile app for Apple devices (namely iPhone and iPod). Backup 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 hourly and monthly. 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. Enterprise Solutions IBackup's real business is its Enterprise solutions. Also running at about a dollar per gigabyte, IBackup's business-level services help businesses 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 also let's you set your own private encryption key, for all plans. In regard to HIPAA compliance: Online backup services cannot legally state that they are officially HIPAA compliant. However, IBackup contains all of the security features to protect data that is transmitted to and from their servers. IBackup follows strict guidelines to meet factors that go into HIPAA compliance. If you want to know what HIPAA is, please visit our FAQ page. Conclusion 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. There is a 15-day free trial however, which offers 50 GB of storage. The trial will automatically upgrade to a subscription plan after 15 days. You can also upgrade to a different plan within the free trial period. 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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| Cheapest Price: | $8.29/mo (w/ annual plan) |
| Free Trial/ Discount: | 15-day free trial; Save 17% w/ annual plans |
| Gigabytes (GB) of Storage Included: | 50 GB; pay extra for more space |
| # of Computers Backed Up: | Unlimited |
| External Drive Backup: | Yes |
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