2013 News Releases / Coverage

Best way to send your digital files to the cloud? The postal service.

Do we have too much digital junk cluttering up our hard drives, or are our average upload speeds of 5.29 Mbps in the U.S. just too slow? That's the question the launch of IDrive's Digital Express service raises.

For $60, iDrive sends you a terabyte drive to load up with your stuff and ship back to its cloud. They encrypt the data, as well, in case it gets lost in the mail.

The service is similar to one that Amazon Web Services launched in 2009 that allowed corporate customers to upload data, but you'd think that four years later we'd have better upload speeds. Or that consumers wouldn't have a terabyte of stuff on their home servers. But iDrive says customers needed it. So they built it.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram experienced in 2011 when he was loading files to the cloud, we do have a bunch of stuff on our drives and the wrong settings can lead to some massive data movement. Plus, at the average speed, uploading a terabyte would take a little less than 19 days. Of course, a terabyte equals roughly 111 DVDs so that’s an awful lot of seasons of Dexter. Personally, I'd rather just stream it when I need it.

About IDrive:
IDrive (https://www.idrive.com), a service of Pro Softnet Corp., is one of the leading services in the field of online backup for consumers and small businesses and is possibly the world's most popular online backup service (courtesy: Alexa). PC World recently named it as one of the Best 101 Freebee products for 2008. The technology behind IDrive has received many accolades, among which is the "Best of the Bunch" rating by PC World, the Editor's Choice pick and the PC Pro award winner.