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IBackup Review: Online 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 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 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. On the Mac, things with IBackup were not as smooth as they were with IDrive. Whereas IDrive's setup was pretty effortless, IBackup was somewhat messy. Hourly backups were slow, and did not play nicely with our firewall. It also seemed to want to backup our user folder twice, overrunning our 10GB limit. 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 Mac users, because of the cost and the hits to functionality. 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 and doesn't plug-and-play. 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. |
Search our blog archives and frequently asked questions for more information about Online Backup Service Reviews
| Discount / Free Trial: | 17% off annual plans |
| Paid Storage Fees: | $9.95-$299.95/mo; discount price: $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: | Mac OS X 10.4 or above |
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