This article will contain a couple of affiliate links for product called IDrive.

By now, those of you are regular readers of this blog know that I had a couple of computer crashes. The last one wiped out my operating system, and subsequently my hard drive crashed as I was trying to retrieve files from it and I lost everything.

When I decided to reload my operating system, I went with Windows 7 instead of Windows 10 because right now I don’t trust Windows 10. I tried to use the Windows 7 backup system for my files, but it was problematic from the start. That wasn’t going to get it done, so I had to come up with another option.

Being an older guy, I have to admit that I don’t trust the cloud all that much. I have a Dropbox account, but only 10 GB and it’s free. I use Evernote, but very sparingly. It seems like you’re always hearing about cloud accounts being hacked, with the biggest hack being the iPhone hack from a few years ago. So I was reluctant to look at it as an option, but a lot of my friends had been backing up their accounts to the cloud for a long while and I decided it was time to open up my mind and give it a shot.

I asked for a couple of recommendations. I got a recommendation for something called Carbonite, and I got a recommendation for something called Comodo. I checked those out online, because people should always do research, and both were ranked okay but they were lacking something that I wanted. I eventually found everything I wanted by going with a program called IDrive.

I’ll get this part out of the way first. Based on normal pricing, IDrive comes in with the best rate. It’s $52.12 a year for the basic package, and you get a discount if you pay for two years. Right now, the best price would have been Carbonite, where they were giving a 30% discount for two years. Comodo really wasn’t going to serve my needs, so I have no idea how much that one costs, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t pick IDrive because of its price.

The reason I picked IDrive is because of convenience. The problem with Carbonite, which was leading until I found out about IDrive through PC Magazine, was there were types of files it wouldn’t automatically copy. For instance, it wouldn’t copy user files at all, and those are the files I wanted more than anything else so I could retrieve all my email, address books, and bookmarks. Also, you have to manually upload all video files. I have two YouTube channels, and I have a lot of smaller videos that I’ve uploaded to Instagram. I also have a lot of video that I’ve downloaded off of YouTube. The last thing I wanted to have to do was manually upload all of those.

IDrive will upload everything, even files from Dropbox, although I refuse to go that route. For me that was a major deal and saves a lot of time on the back end.

IDrive turns out to be very easy to use. You download and install the software, and when you open it up it automatically scansyour computer to see what folders you have and how many files are in each of those folders.

You can decide to accept everything it recommends you back up or decide on your own what you want to keep and what you wanted to ignore. I decided to ignore all the folders that have to do with “my pictures”, “my videos”, etc., because I don’t save any files in those folders. I also didn’t want to save anything that was listed under Program Files because it’s always easy to reload software. Because I’d lost my hard drive, I only had to deal with around 90 GB of files, and the plan I picked from IDrive allows you to save up to 2 TB of files for the price I mentioned above. My present usage is only 4%, and if my other drive was still serviceable I’d have still been under 25%; 2TB is plenty!

After you’re done selecting all the files, your computer is ready to start scanning and uploading things, and luckily it give you 10 minutes to decide whether you want to go through with it or not. The reason you probably don’t want to go through with it is because it may use up resources on your computer that will slow things down if you have stuff to do. That’s when you go into the settings and set a time for when you wanted to run.

The first time it’s going to take a lot longer as it goes through your entire computer to get all the files that you want and upload them. After that, it will only upload files that it hasn’t uploaded previously, which means it goes a lot faster. I have mine set to start scanning and uploading at 1:35 in the morning.

There’s another setting that tells the program not to upload anything after you’ve made changes, and this is important to know. Every day after it’s done its thing, it’s going to send you an email telling you how many files it’s uploaded and how many errors you have. You’re going to want to go through your log file for the day to find out what kind errors you have. All of mine have had to do with folders I guided it to that were empty, and that means I don’t want it to go to those places anymore. Initially whenever I made changes and hit save it started to run through the entire process. Now that I’ve changed it, it knows not to start until very early in the morning.

One more thing. With your account you only get one user, but you can use it on multiple computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc, as long as you stay under 2TB; if you need more than that you can upgrade your account and they’ll give you a price for that. This will work well for me because everything I have saved on my other technology will still stay under 1TB; that’s not all that bad a deal, and if she wants me to, I can add my wife’s laptop and other technology as well, as long as I sign in with my account.

I easily recommend IDrive as a cloud back up program you might want to check out. I’ve also become an affiliate for them, which I’ve linked to a couple of times in this article (see the links with the blue line) as well as the image over there to the right.

I don’t promote anything I don’t believe in, which is why I only have this program and Mailwasher at the current time that I promote here (if I can find a Fitbit affiliate program I’ll be promoting that as well lol). I hope you give it at least a look, and if you have any questions you can ask me or you can check out their website where they have an extensive FAQ.