One of the most important things you can do is backup the photos and videos on your phone. Problem is, it can be complicated and costly.
Now, in the wake of Google Photos starting to charge for storage, a company called iDrive sees an opportunity. They have a new app called iDrive Photos which will backup all of the photos and videos on your phone at their full resolution for just $10 a year. And yes, it’s unlimited.
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Sounds too good to be true? That’s what I thought, which is why I met with the CEO of the Calabasas-based company in person.
“Backup is very important… it’s like insurance,” explained Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of iDrive.
The company is fairly well known for helping individuals, businesses and enterprise companies backup their computers and servers.
“iDrive has been around for 2 decades, we are a leader in the backup segment, we have won PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice 7 years in a row and we are rated best by several publications,” said Kulkarni.
The iDrive Photos app specifically focuses on the solving photo and video backups on a smartphone. It works for both iOS and Android. In my testing, it’s fast, efficient and super easy to use. Just install it on your phone, open it up and it goes to work, backing up all the photos and videos stored on your phone.
“There is no catch… we offer pure backup, that’s our strength,” explained Kulkarni. When pressed, he explained that yes, there will be some people that take advantage of the generous no storage limits, but that will average out with typical consumers using a reasonable amount of storage.
In just a week or so of testing, I uploaded about 50 gigabytes of photos and videos. You can see how much storage you’re using at any time in the app settings.
Keep in mind, this is not a complete replacement for apps like Google Photos. iDrive Photos is pretty basic. There are no ways to organize, edit or search your pictures. It’s just a super easy way to make sure you have a backup copy of your photos and videos.
I do like the instant restore feature, which most other apps don’t offer. This makes it super easy to restore all of your photos to a new phone in just a click.
As for privacy, iDrive tells me that they aren’t interested in your personal data. They don’t use your photos for anything and don’t sell ads against your information.
“Your data is not used for any purposes… our primary business is backup and restore that’s all we do,” concluded Kulkarni.
When backing up to Microsoft, Apple, Google or Dropbox, there’s an expectation that your data will be around for years. But iDrive is smaller and independent, so it’s an honest question to wonder about the longevity of your backups.
IDrive tells me they’ve been around for about two decades and currently has about 4 million customers trusting them with 400 petabytes of data (1 Petabyte equals 1000000 Gigabytes). There’s a good chance they’ll be around for a while but if you’re worried you can use iDrive as a supplemental backup for your data.
Data backup experts will say that you should actually have your data in three different places. One close to you, like your phone, one nearby, like a hard drive at your house and one far, like in the cloud.
Like the CEO said, a backup is insurance. At $10 a year, this is a fantastic way to give yourself the reassurance that if something happens to your phone, at least your pictures and videos are safe. Keep in mind, you can test it out for 7 days free and the first year of service is just $1 if you sign up through the website versus an in-app purchase.