Fast Facts
- Company HQ: Calabasas, California
- Number of Employees: 51-200 (LinkedIn)
- Ownership: Private
- Founded: 1995
IDrive’s Approach
IDrive is a cloud backup and storage provider that delivers solutions for computers and cloud-based services. Their Google Workspace Backup product offers all the features you’d need from a backup and recovery tool, yet remains budget-friendly with straightforward, annual per-seat and per-TB pricing. The platform provides backup for all the essential components of Google Workspace, including Gmail, Google Drive, Shared Drives, Calendar, and Contacts—all via a single, easy-to-use interface.
Market Position
With over two decades of experience in the industry, IDrive is a long-established and trusted provider of backup services. They offer solutions for individuals, resellers, and organizations of all sizes, distinguishing themselves with an emphasis on affordability and ease of use.
Use Cases
Automated backups: IDrive Google Workspace Backup carries out up to three automated backups per day of all Gmail, Google Drive, Shared Drives, Contacts, and Calendar data—all of which are secured with AES 256-bit encryption during transfer and storage. On deployment, the platform carries out a full backup. After that, subsequent backups are incremental, which helps to reduce backup storage requirements and de-duplication efforts. Outside of these automated backups, users can also perform backups manually on demand.
Business and personal backups: IDrive supports backups for both personal Google accounts and business Google Workspace accounts. This could be particularly useful for organizations looking to foster strong security practices amongst their employees, even whilst outside the office—though personal plans would need to be purchased in addition to a business plan.
Data recovery and restoration: By automatically and incrementally backing up data, IDrive ensures the safe retention of multiple data versions, making it easier to locate specific data for restoration. Once backed up, users can easily migrate, export, and download data, including an option for cross-user restoration. Users can restore the whole Drive, or search for and retrieve individual files and folders.
Ransomware protection: With incremental backups, point-in-time version restore, and granular recovery options, IDrive Google Workspace Backup makes it easy for organizations to recover data in the event of data loss, theft, or corruption. The platform secures all backups with AES 256-bit encryption during transfer and storage, authenticates all data transmissions and user interactions from Google Workspace, and verifies users’ Google Workspace accounts using OAuth to help prevent unauthorized access to—and tampering with—backups.
Compliance support: IDrive has data centers located in the US, UK, EU, and Canada. Its Google Workspace Backup product is compliant with SSAE-16/SOC 2 Type II standards. It also offers encryption, authentication, and authorization controls, as well as physical data center security measures, to help organizations adhere to HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, SEC/FINRA, and PCI DSS requirements.
The Interface
IDrive offers an intuitive, web-based management portal that’s very easy to navigate. While the interface is relatively simple, it covers all the core functionality you’d require of a Google Workspace backup tool. It offers a clear, high-level overview of backup activity and status, as well as reports on the recovery status of each Google Workspace component (Drive, Gmail, Shared Drives, Calendar, and Contacts), including per-user reports that detail when the last backup was carried out and how much storage is being used.
From the same portal, admins can initiate backups and restore data, with an easy-to-use search function that makes it quick to locate the specific data to be restored and/or exported.
Finally, the management portal also offers activity logs to help support compliance and auditing processes.
You can explore the interface in more detail via screenshots of the product on the IDrive website.
Strengths
- Easy deployment: IDrive Google Workspace Backup is very easy to set up; even non-technical users can deploy the platform in just a few minutes. Users simply install the IDrive app from Google Marketplace, then authenticate their Google Workspace admin account in IDrive.
- Backup across multiple domains: Users with admin privileges can configure multiple domains from their Google Workspace account, and manage backup and recovery across multiple configured domains via a single management portal. Each domain is charged per seat (Google Workspace user) and billed as per the subscribed plan.
- Granular restoration options: Users can choose to restore individual items or folders, or entire systems (e.g., Drives, Gmail inboxes), making it easy to recover from minor data loss incidents, such as accidental deletion, right through to widespread deletion or corruption caused by ransomware attacks, outages, or natural disasters. Data can also be restored across users; i.e., if someone leaves the company, their emails can be restored to a subfolder within their manager’s inbox.
- Point-in-time restoration and rollback: IDrive Google Workspace Backup takes point-in-time “snapshots” of data, which enables the platform to capture data across multiple versions and states. This means that users can roll back their data to the exact state it was in at the time the last backup was carried out, which is particularly useful for limiting data loss in the event of widespread data loss, e.g., a ransomware attack.
- Multiple data centers: IDrive has secure data centers located in the US (Oregon), UK (London), EU (Ireland and Frankfurt), and Canada, positioning the platform well to serve organizations based in North America and Europe.
- Reporting: The IDrive management portal offers helpful reports on backup status and statistics, which provide information on backups, restores, and exports at a user level. The platform also offers detailed activity logs to support compliance and auditing processes.
Cautions
- Backup frequency: IDrive offers up to three automated backups per day, and these backups run on a pre-defined schedule for the entire organization. There’s little flexibility when it comes to changing the frequency of automated backups, which may be a limitation for organizations looking to back up certain user accounts or data types more/less frequently than others.
- Static data retention rules: IDrive retains automated daily backups for 30 days. After 30 days, one daily backup is saved per user; after 90 days, one weekly backup is saved per user; after one year, one monthly backup is saved per user. This may be a limitation for organizations looking to set different retention periods for different types of data, e.g., health records.
- Storage charges: There are additional charges for exceeding monthly storage limits ($5/TB/month), which may be a limiting factor for organizations with large storage requirements.
Summary
IDrive is typically used for personal backups, but it’s also suitable for business use cases. The platform allows 10TB of storage per Google Workspace user per month, and additional storage costs an extra $5 per TB per month. This makes the solution ideal for organizations with smaller storage requirements. In terms of geolocation, due to the platform’s available data center locations, IDrive is best suited for customers based in North America and Europe.
IDrive’s Google Workspace Backup is SOC 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified, and supports HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, SEC/FINRA, and PCI DSS compliance. This, along with its comprehensive backup activity reporting and activity logging, makes it well-suited for organizations that need to comply with federal or industry-mandated compliance requirements, such as those in the education and finance sectors.
Overall, we’d recommend that organizations looking for a straightforward, reliable, and user-friendly backup solution for their Google Workspace environment consider adding IDrive Google Workspace Backup to their shortlist.
