fyi: Crashplan having a sale currently: https://www.crashplan.com/bigsale/

Well, I thought I should report here that I finally stopped using CrashPlan. The memory use stayed around 1.5-2GB permanently, never improving over the years I continued using it! This is just a really bad sign IMO. But I couldn't be sure if there was something wrong until I tried another service, and as outlined in my original review, my needs were somewhat specific: affordable for large data sets (I'm now backing up nearly 3TB, up from just under 2TB when I wrote the review), a "seeded" backup option, and a local backup option in the same client, primarily.

I finally found iDrive and to my surprise it seems to meet all my needs. It has also been running on my full nearly-3TB data set for a few weeks now and memory use has hovered around 150MB! So clearly CrashPlan is doing something wrong, wrong, wrong.

Not only does iDrive do online and local backup - like CrashPlan - it *also* has a sync option and a full-disk image function (you can't schedule it though), it supports mobile devices too, it can backup Facebook and some other social media (many people here probably don't care, but it's an interesting feature), *and* it has online file sharing, which Crashplan and many other backup-oriented online storage systems don't support (so I don't have to keep using the free and highly space-limited Dropbox). It may be a security risk, and I would guess that in general CrashPlan's security is superior to iDrives, but for my needs iDrive is sufficient. Oh yeah, and they have a "seeded" backup and restore option too (called iDrive Express). It's kind of a Swiss Army Knife of features, which might be good or bad depending on your perspective, but I can say that at lesat memory use doesn't suffer because of it!

There are two caveats to the iDrive services that I should point out. First is that it's more expensive than CrashPlan. The amount of data I have necessitated the "10TB" plan, with is $375yr (holy crap, what!?). So actually iDrive would not have been an option for me at all had it not been for the fact that they have all kinds of deals out there. This is the one I took advantage of: https://deals.androidheadlines.com/sales/idrive-1tb-local-10tb-cloud-backup-bundle
It has been set to expire "within a few days" for months now, it seems to be perpetually on sale essentially.

This is an odd one, $97 gets you both an iDrive Wifi (a local hard drive for backup that you can connect to wirelessly, great for people who only have laptops in their homes), *and* a 1 year subscription to the 10TB plan at iDrive. What's odd about it is it would be a huge discount - and worthwhile for me and probably many others - if it were *just* the 10TB plan, but it also includes the wifi device. Mine is actually sitting unused on my desk, it was the 10TB of online data I was after.

The other thing that's odd to me about this deal is I contacted them before finding this deal saying I would happily pay for a 3 or 5TB plan that was priced in-between the 1TB and 10TB plans they already have, and that the 10TB option was way too expensive for me and much more space than I needed anyway. A sales rep got back to me but even after repeated back-and-forth and knowing I was a potential CrashPlan convert, he didn't offer me a price that was even remotely appealing. I had written iDrive off and was just going to stick with CrashPlan until I found this deal. It's quite strange to me then that the sales rep wouldn't offer me even a *decent* deal, let alone this frankly kind of crazy discount (80% off).

So you pay $97 the first year basically, and then it's a discounted $59 rate for the 2nd year. After that it's the full price, which I don't think I'll be willing to pay. But it gives me 2 years to decide if I like the service and to find something better if it doesn't justify the price when that 3rd year renewal comes due. In that time they'll hopefully realize a 3 or 5TB mid-tier plan also makes sense, or bring down the cost of their 10TB as competition from others continues. 2 years from now storage costs could be a fair bit less, or at least that's my hope.

Anyway, the other issue with their service is that in order to get the iDrive Express you have to fill out an online form. It's not something you can do from within your online account, for some reason, so you have to fill out some details including your address. For some odd reason the form on their site never worked for me, it always told me that I had to fill in the "State" field, which of course I had filled in every time to no avail; it kept giving me that error. I tried on multiple browsers, then multiple computers, and it never worked. I contacted their support several times about it and they said to try again and couldn't understand why it didn't work, but I'm honestly not confident they even tried it themselves, so it may well be legitimately broken. I finally called in to resolve the issue, which they insisted on (they wouldn't do it over email), and while the support rep and overall experience was not particularly good, I did finally get everything resolved. The iDrive "express" shipment took quite a while to arrive, but it's free (I think they have faster shipping options, but I was still using CrashPlan and not in a hurry at this point).

iDrive itself is fine. Its interface is a bit quirky, but no worse than CrashPlan, and according to their support the client is native, not Java. It certainly seems to respond and perform better than CrashPlan's did, particularly in the area of memory use. Bandwidth usage has been fine, in fact it saturated my upstream cable bandwidth until I throttled it (the throttle percentage is relative to your LAN connection speed, it seems, and not in some specific unit of measure unfortunately, e.g. Kb/s, so I had to set it to 10% or something of my 100mb LAN port; not sure if this also affects actual LAN transfer or just WAN). I don't use the social media backup yet, nor have I tried online file sharing or file sync. I just started using local backup, but have been using the online since my "Express" transfer finished a week or so ago. I haven't tried a restore yet, I know I should test that and I will soon.

Overall I'm fairly happy with iDrive and plan to stick with it for at least 2 years at this point. For those with 1TB of data or less, their standard plan is competitively priced and the breadth of features combined with reasonable resource use is, IMO, unmatched. Even if you do have "only" 1TB of data, iDrive Express ("seeded backup and restore) is still very worthwhile, and many other services don't offer it despite offering "unlimited" space, a fact which seems quite inconsistent, even disingenuous, to me.

So has anyone else had experience with iDrive? Anyone still using CrashPlan?

- Oshyan

Have you tried Roll Your Own solutions with S3 or Glacier backing it up?  That's what I'm starting to look into now.

I might do a mini-review roundup when I've solidified... but that's a bit away.  Some that I'm looking at:

StrongSync
Cloudberry Backup
CloudBerry Box
Duplicati
FastGlacier
Jungle Disk -  Not sure if they still have the desktop version publicly available.
S3 Backup

These last items are command-line tools.  The command line option, while more than I wanted to get into, is becoming appealing since I can link it to my current backup solutions:

S3Sync.rb - The author isn't maintaining it anymore, so not sure I want to get into this.
S3 Sync
S3 Tools

A couple of articles:

http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/How_to_backup_the_Synology_Server_to_Amazon_S3
http://eberly.org/2008/10/27/how-i-automated-my-backups-to-amazon-s3-using-rsync/ (Of course, s3fs is in an uncertain state, so I'm going to have to deal with alternatives... maybe)

Of Course, there's also Tarsnap- but I'm not going that hardcore: https://www.tarsnap.com/

I've only just gotten started, but they seem to have a couple of things in the faqs about it:

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/
https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/faqs/

Glacier sounds pretty cool if your backup storage needs are relatively small. Doing some rough calculations, Glacier would cost about $370/year for 3TB of data. iDrive is $375/year for up to 10TB of data (not counting the discount). Considering JavaJones' current usage and needs, plus the greatly discounted 2 years of service, I don't think Glacier would offer him any benefit over iDrive.

Cool thing about amazon... you don't have to rely on rough estimates.

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

$30.72 per month for the storage.  Unless there's a catastrophic need to retrieve all the data, that should be pretty accurate, within the number of requests- with 4GB/1000 requests, it goes up to $30.77.  If it's truly catastrophic, you get it out the same way you got it in.

What I like about it is the size of Amazon, and the redundancy.  That's why Amazon can get away with charging more IMO.  And the real problems that I've had with RYO solutions is the infrastructure.

But yes, each service is going to have it's own uses.


... but woe to you if you get over 10TB.  iDrive scales into business at that point.  I guess their redundancy and such is better for business.

Update on iDrive: All is not so rosy.

I have run into a couple of concerns and issues over the past week or two that I thought I should mention here.

First off I get notifications for updates to the client but trying to use the built-in update function never works. It downloads to 100%, then just sits there and never applies an update. This may be a security setting issue on my end. It's a minor but consistent annoyance. Downloading the application from their server manually and then just reinstalling it seems to work fine to update though.

Second - and perhaps most importantly - their system's support for deduplication seems to either be extremely minimal/simplistic or *non-existent*.

This is normally considered as much of a benefit to the host/service provider as to the user in that it can help them reduce data use on their end *if* it's done *between* people's accounts (i.e. if you have a large movie file downloaded and Joe Schmoe who also uses iDrive does, then they only need to store a single instance of the file on their server). This is an obvious privacy and security risk and it does not appear that iDrive does this (which is good for you, the user). For the user the main benefit is reduced bandwidth use if the file can be found to already exist on their server.

If deduplication is done *within a single user's account* it can still help with bandwidth, i.e. if you *move* files around on your system, it does not have to re-upload them. Unfortunately iDrive does not seem to handle this, or doesn't support it very well. What happened is I have 2 physical hard drives being backed up to the same location at iDrive (and locally). I had 150GB of photos on one drive when I did my original iDrive Express "seeded" backup that I sent to them. I later moved that 150GB of photos to the other drive, where all the other pictures live; it's a sort of archive, whereas the main drive is an SSD and a "working drive". So I do such file transfers semi-frequently. iDrive then had to *re-backup* all 150GB of photos (re-upload), even though they were the same exact photos and had simply been moved from one drive to another!

I consider this to be a pretty big drawback, at least for my usage patterns. I will seldom be moving such a large amount of data at once, usually it's more like 10-15GB, and that can re-upload fairly quickly. But it's still a needless inconvenience and evidence of an extremely simplistic - frankly naive - backup client. It is quite honestly not confidence inspiring, although I have no other specific reason to believe that their backup system is shoddy. It just seems like such a big, important, and obvious thing, one wonders what else they're overlooking...

It also may help explain why CrashPlan - which uses fairly sophisticated deduplication, block-level even, I believe - might be using so much more memory than iDrive. It seems reasonable to conclude that CrashPlan is just doing a lot more with the data locally, i.e. it also does compression, whereas iDrive seems to do so minimally if at all (the local backup size is roughly equivalent to the original data size on disk), or to only do it for remote backup and not local. I would really like to see both compression *and* deduplication and I consider both it to be an important features of any modern backup solution. The fact that iDrive appears to be missing both this (to some degree) is worrisome. They do claim to have compression and incremental backup on their features page, but I assume both are it is referring to remote backups, and apparently "incremental" doesn't cover my scenario of moved-but-not-modified files. [edit: I later found that compression *is* working]

Lastly, when I contacted support to discuss this issue they were not exactly impressively knowledgeable. The rep did eventually tell me several times that the data would have to be re-uploaded, but couldn't explain why and didn't seem to understand that this was a missing *feature* (and an important and relatively standard one). He did say he'd open a feature request for that, but had no information about whether such a request was common. Visiting their (surprisingly hard to find from their site) forums I don't see any other mention of it, which is surprising. Maybe my usage pattern is unusual.

Anyway, all that being said I'm still sticking with iDrive for a while, both because I have invested money in it, and because CrashPlan was not without its (significant) problems either. As I've mentioned, I have such a large amount of data that a "seeded" backup service is necessary, and the per-GB storage cost needs to be reasonably low. iDrive and CrashPlan are the only 2 services that seem affordable for my needs at present, but I'd love to hear about other options if anyone is aware of one that fits those specific needs.

Last but not least if you're still interested in iDrive after my concerns expressed above, and if you don't need 10TB of space like I do, this deal might be more of interest (I haven't tested it to see if it's still live):
https://www.idrive.com/idrive/deals/pd/backupreview

- Oshyan

4wd, glad to hear the updates work for you. Must be some configuration issue on my end. I'll have to look into it.

- Oshyan

So clearly CrashPlan is doing something wrong, wrong, wrong.

Java? :-)

I'm fairly certain there are more effective approaches, such as using the NTFS file table to look for changed files, doing active file system monitoring (performance considerations?)

If I were to design a backup solution, I'd definitely use a combination of USN Journal scanning, if available, on program start-up, combined with filesystem notification events.

Yes, it's still chugging along here also on my main machine - I suppose I could have taken them up on the initial HDD load, (free for Australia also, which is good), but it wasn't really critical in my case.

It's definitely good to be able to back up everything to the one account: 3 PCs, 1 server, 2 Android tablets, 1 Android phone, and 1 Windows phone.
And be able to access anything, across all of them, from any device.

Thanks for the pointer to iDrive. I'm looking for an alternative to Crashplan.

I got the 4 year plan for the discount, with 2.9 TB on my machine and another 2 TB on my wife's, but I'm far from happy and the 4 years is nearly up. I'm not a fan of the excessive RAM use, but I really dislike how it starts the backup over from 0% after doing a version scan. It's taking forever on my 10Mbps upstream connection.

I also dislike how changing the backup set causes it to start over from scratch. A few weeks ago it was at around 95%, but after excluding my Chrome profile to speed things up, it started over and now I'm at 24%.

However, as you said, alternatives like BackBlaze aren't a viable option due to policies like only retaining deleted files for 30 days.

Using Amazon Glacier or Google Nearline is cost prohibitive, but they're getting there. I would love to see a service using Nearline with some deduplication and a lean client. I have nothing against Java per se, but CrashPlan clearly hasn't optimized their client for memory usage.

I'm thinking about trying iDrive but the discount expired and I know very little about them. For all of Crashplan's flaws, I was fairly confident they wouldn't be disappearing any time soon.

I've looked at SpiderOak's 5TB option for $279/year or $25/month. It's still pricey and not exclusively focused on backups, but the site says they store every version of your file.

I'd love to hear of other alternatives.

Thanks for the referral code. I'm hesitant to jump into iDrive due to the cost and the issues you wrote about, but I'm not seeing much else out there.

I would have thought someone would have seen this need and filled it, but there doesn't seem to be a really good solution for our storage needs at a reasonable price point.

I keep hoping CrashPlan will improve their client when I see an update, but so far I've been disappointed.

Using Amazon Glacier or Google Nearline is cost prohibitive, but they're getting there. I would love to see a service using Nearline with some deduplication and a lean client. I have nothing against Java per se, but CrashPlan clearly hasn't optimized their client for memory usage.

Kinda impossible to do for Java. You need to reserve a heap that's large enough to handle your largest theoretical load, plus some extra for garbage collection bookkeeping. This can be grown dynamically, but I don't think the JVM ever shrinks the operating system allocated heap. Makes sense for server loads, isn't always a nice feature on client machines though.

Hey JavaJones and other iDrive users,

sorry for resurrecting this old thread, but what's your verdict on iDrive now, with the benefit of hindsight? Has it worked out for you?

P.S. Does any of you use the iDrive Wi-Fi device as well by any chance? Is it worth the $89.99, or can that function be emulated with a cheaper alternative?