Elephant Drive vs. iDrive -initial review

[mjonis]

OK, so new to QNAP NAS. I still have the old NetGear ReadyNas which is using NetGear ReadyNas Vault. Which, in reality, is Elephant Drive.

So I'm much more familiar with Elephant Drive than iDrive.

Fortunately since ReadyNas Vault/Elephant drive are the same, I can use what's leftover of my pre-paid ReadyNas Vault subscription for my QNAP. Unfortunately it seems Elephant Drive does not have a 1-year pre-pay discount option (ReadyNas Vault does).

Anyway:

The differences and pros/cons so far:
1) Elephant Drive costs significantly more. $9.95/month for 1 TB. iDrive with the discount for the FIRST year was like $17.something Even at full price, it's still cheaper than Elephant Drive.

2) Elephant drive is MUCH faster for backup than iDrive. I've had the iDrive backup running for 3+ days and it's only backed up 30 GB so far. I'm on a Verizon FIOS 75/75 line. Elephant drive finished that in like an hour.

3) Elephant drive has NO email reporting. You have to manually check each and every day for backup status. Ridiculous to be quite honest for as much as they charge. iDrive has email reporting, but it's buggy as hell. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

4) Elephant Drive seems more reliable so far. I've had issues with every backup with iDrive and their tech support process is extremely slow. I think 3+ days after submitting the info they requested they finally got back to me to tell me they will look at the info. Basically the backups just seem to hang for no reason. I'm using the supported version from Qnap's app store. The updated version from iDrive, while it installs, doesn't function at all, so had to go back to the supported version.

5) Now, the biggest downside to Elephant drive: No files over 2.0 GB. Unless you want to pay $35/month (yeah, ouch). iDrive doesn't seem to have this issue (so far).

6) Elephant Drive has CDP. iDrive does not (for NAS).

Unfortunately all the other cloud based backups seemed ridiculously overpriced or complex to figure out pricing, let alone setting up the backup. Trying to calculate storage, let alone bandwidth for "requests" is too much effort, IMO.

So I'd say, if you can afford it, and don't mind the 2.0 GB file limits, go with Elephant Drive.