Likelihood to Recommend Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review It scales well from the individual to corporate environments with many different plans to suit your needs and budget. For backing up servers such as Exchange or SQL I've used their sister product iBackup, which is also excellent and we have no problems with, so maybe they should merge the two products into one which would make it a better overall proposition. It also seems to handle backing up mapped drives as well, which is what we used for a while before getting the on server version. That being said it can use up quite a bit of bandwidth so make sure you schedule at night when noone is working. However it does only backup changed files which is great.
Read full review Pros Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities. Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions. It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world. Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS. Read full review Super easy to download, setup, set preferences and key account settings. The first back-up took all night, but after that the back-ups are quick, seamless, and always on-time per my preferernces. I love the confirmations and details on each and every back-up start-up and completion. Very informative and reassuring. Very easy to get back anything that I may forgotten to save or replace during the work. Can't think of anything negative at this time! Thank you IDrive! Read full review Cons Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are Read full review It is becomes painfully slow for its unlimited backup when most of the users who use it for long time even for a month. This should be improved. There are not many options on the IDrive to select the "AUX" menu, I'm experiencing this problem with my newly bought second hand BMW 3 series E90 32i, 2010 model. There is not external devices alternative for me. Restoring an older version of a file is the hardest stuffs for me Read full review Likelihood to Renew It does everything that it needs to to create an effecitve Three level backup to the cloud of all your important data, its reliable, dependable and peformant in its use cases. It overcomes the need to store offsite physical media such as Tape or disk storage. And its cost and level of reporting can be tailored to fit the use case of your business.
Read full review Usability It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review The desktop interface seems intuitive to work with.
Read full review Support Rating AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review I have not had to use their tech support. I did call once but luckily figured out what to do while I was on hold so I disconnected. If I really needed them it would have been a very long hold time I suppose.
Read full review Implementation Rating Did not participate in the implementation.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup,
Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review I was a Backblaze user for 5 years because they had a very cost effective plan for my storage needs. However, they were very poor at backing up external devices quickly, and made it a pain in the butt to keep the backups active due to their 30 days connectivity policy.
Dropbox is a great fit for cloud backup when you need to access the backup files in the cloud frequently.
IDrive is the best solution out there for true backup of devices in case they are damaged or lost.
Read full review Return on Investment It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost. The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in. If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents. Read full review iDrive has saved us money as their pricing structure is fair and they allow multiple devices to be backed up under the same account - where others do not. iDrive has saved us time as we no longer have to manually back up and sync files on our computers to external drives. iDrive has lessened the burden of stress. We no longer worry that we may lose critical data that can no longer be recovered. Read full review ScreenShots IDrive Online Backup and Object Storage e2 Screenshots