IDrive (for iPad)

Pros Clear, pleasant interface. Precise selection of what's backed up. Access and sharing from any devices to email, SMS, and social networks. Viewers for photos, music, video, and documents. Reasonable cost for extra storage. Private encryption option.

Cons Allows weak account passwords. Bottom Line IDrive for iPad offers a combination of capabilities not found in other apps, letting you back up, share, and enjoy all your photos, music, video, and more—anywhere.

By Michael Muchmore

I never need to back up photos shot on my iPhone or iPad anymore, since I use Apple iCloud's wonderful included Photo Stream. The Apple cloud is also capable of backing up your music, calendars, contacts, documents. So what can a third-party app and service like IDrive add to this? Backing up videos is one thing, along with giving access to all your PC or Mac backup data, not to mention Web access to all of the above. As I went on testing IDrive, indeed I found more and more reasons that it could be a useful adjunct to even the most devoted iCloud user (if such a thing exists). 

Setup and Signup
IDrive is available on the iTunes App Store for all iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. There are also Windows, Mac, and Android clients. You get 5GB of storage free, and a very reasonable $49.50 per year gets you a full 150GB. (With Google Drive you'd pay $59.88 for just 100GB, SkyDrive offers 125GB for $50, and SugarSync costs far more at $99.99 a year for 100GB) The IDrive app is a small 11MB download that refreshingly doesn't ask for your location or  pester you with yet more notifications. (Competitor SugarSync, by contrast, won't let you upload a photo without sharing your location.)

But you do need an account to do anything with it. You'll have to make one critical decision before you even sign in: whether to use default or private encryption; if you choose the latter, the burden of remembering the password is entirely on you: Even IDrive employees won't be able to retrieve it if you lose it (which also means that they can't turn over your backups to the feds, subpoena or no!).

Now back to the matter of getting an account. You'll just need an email address and a password. But I found a flaw right here at this point: I deviously tried using a simple 4-character password, in fact a common name, and IDrive had no problem creating my account with this. Even Yahoo Mail won't let you create an account with such a weak password, so I'd recommend that a service designed for securely storing your sensitive data enforce stronger passwords.

Interface
Once I'd successfully (perhaps too easily) created my IDrive account, I was greeted with a screen showing a Backup dialog with entries for my Contacts, Photos, Videos, and Calendar—all checked. I could select whichever of these I wanted to include in the backup. At first it seemed that I could only select all photos or none, but it turned out that I could tap the Photos (or Videos or Calendar) icon to actually select more precisely what I wanted backed up, down to the individual photo.

This is actually an advantage over Apple's built-in iCloud Photo Stream backup, which is all or nothing. You can specify that all photos shot with the device get automatically uploaded à la Photo Stream, but the ability to pick which photos you want uploaded is an advantage. And surprisingly, SugarSync, a previous Editors' Choice, can't even back up your iPad contacts and calendar entries, not to mention your videos.

At the bottom of this dialog listing what you've chosen to back up is a simple, clear blue button: Backup Now. When I hit this, I'd hoped to see some kind of progress bar telling me how the backup was coming along, but the entries simply disappeared from the dialog. Hitting the Home button at its top right corner offered the additional choices of Access and Restore, Shortcuts, and Settings.

View the original article here