Smooth sailing and truly set and forget!
Local backups are a must but often insufficient. Despite being careful, I have lost important data in the past, due to personal mistakes or technical issues. To make sure I fulfill a contractual obligation, I need an offsite backup solution that is reliable, affordable, fast and adaptable to my workflow.
I have been a CrashPlan (Code42) customer for over a decade. The service was good enough for my needs, but I had to work around it's limitations. On my system it was incompatible with the synchronization of Adobe products. This forced me to have two different mirrored sets of data on my desktop PC, one for the Adobe sync, one for CP (Code42 customer service couldn't help me and Adobe don't really have a customer service). Another big issue was the lack of native support for NAS.
I am migrating to a portable platform and 8TB of SSD storage for laptops are too expensive, to have all my data twice on the machine. At the same time, I am not willing to sync all data from my laptop to my desktop PC and leave the PC on just so that I can perform the backup on CP. I was looking for an alternative that would allow me directly to make a backup from my central storage solution: my Synology NAS.
Online most "best of 2022" websites suggest iDrive as a backup solution. There is a native package for the Synology DSM, so I decided to give it a go. At first I was bummed to receive a "Hostname not resolved" error message after installation, but quickly found out it was an issue related to the newest DMS update and an easy fix is available.
After that, it has been just smooth sailing. The service has all the options I need and has worked reliably for about two weeks now. The price is acceptable and the upload speed surprisingly fast (I actually have to throttle it, not to clog my upload bandwidth; an option for this is available in the interface). Being able to perform the backup from my NAS means being able to backup all my data, no matter the original source, without the need for extra tricks to do the job or keeping my PC on only to do the backup. The service doesn't slow down my NAS and all functions are unaffected (CPU and RAM load on my humble DS 218+ are usually well below 10% and 15% respectively, when using the iDrive service).
The additional Cloud Drive and opportunity to backup my phone with the same plan are a big bonus. On mobile as well, the app works perfectly, no bugs, no issues, fast, easy to set up and use.
My tests to recover the data went all as expected. Randomly picked files could be downloaded and opened without issues.
I wish you could encrypt the file names as well for added privacy, but that's a minor issues I can live with. All in all I can recommend the service.
