Don't Use iDrive

I signed up for iDrive to backup my development machine last week. It takes a long time for the first backup, so it was still running after five days last night when it stopped, and this morning I couldn't log in. Called technical support and someone named Richard told me my server was down and he had no ETA for when it would be back up, but usually they come back up within 24 hours.When I complained that this wasn't acceptable he argued long with me about how nothing's perfect and things break down. I made points about being a new customer, and about reliability and availability and making your data separate from your servers so that your customers aren't affected by the outages of individual servers, but he didn't seem to understand, just kept arguing about how nothing's perfect.So I asked him to cancel my account, which he did, but he said he could only give me a prorate on my money back, not the full amount, even though they hadn't actually gotten to the point where they had backed up a single bit. It's a small amount, but it steams me anyway. They hadn't provided any service at all, just wasted my time.So I recommend that people not use iDrive.I currently have a spare drive that I backup to, but a fire could wipe me out (my development stuff, not the website, that's on a separate server), so that's why I'm playing around with backing up to the cloud. Recommendations welcome for who to try next.--Percy

FTP over VPN to a remote serverOldie but still works.

I've never found any backup software to be exceptional. They all take too long Currently I've been using Acronis.
I use it more for taking images of HDDs for disaster recovery purposes. It seems to work well for that.
We store the images locally on their own backed-up drive.But, Acronis does offer some sort of cloud-storage for backups.
I don't know much about it, but if you're looking for such things, Acronis is a fairly large back-up company that deals specifically with backing things up. As opposed to Apple where it would simply be "one-of-many" services that they offer.

I signed up for Carbonite yesterday, should take about 9 days to back up everything, but after that it backs up files as you change them. You can only recover a deleted file for 30 days, which I don't like since it can't tell the difference between a deleted file versus a renamed file, so I'll lose the backup history of renamed files after 30 days, but nobody out there is perfect. IDrive had the same "feature", but its interface was better.I'm shocked at the quality of software these days. There was a book about 30 years ago where the author predicted that the problem of software quality would eventually drown the industry, but this was before the PC revolution, and he didn't know that expectations for quality would gradually be ground down until the standard became "doesn't crash that often."--Percy

Heh. Yeah, for sure.Nobody cares how a system is programmed.
Nobody cares if the code is similar throughout a large project.
Nobody cares if it is easy-to-update-or-debug at a later/future date.People only care if it works for the presentation.I've decided to stop programming and just make slide-shows "This is where the user enters their data... All your employees are named 'John Doe', right?"
"What was that?"
"Nothing... on this next slide... er... screen, we'll take a look at the results. Notice how fast it loads!"Everybody wins!

Though it'll be two weeks tomorrow, still no sign of my refund from IDrive. I filed a ticket (which requires login, so evidently my account was *not* cancelled - thanks, Richard )They're compounding their mistakes. Don't use IDrive.--Percy

Sadly, this is now the norm. The main reason for the degradation in quality is that developers and companies are now complacent to the fact that they can simply 'patch' software over the internet. As such, software is often shipped with known bugs and one has to perform a large update after the initial install to get the latest version.I see this behavior especially in the latest batch of games for the next generation consoles. Many are often VERY buggy at release and I swear most are probably at a beta level of quality at shipment. They have essentially turned their entire user base into beta testers.In the old days of gaming for example, when games had to be placed on printed circuit boards, quality assurance was kept at the highest level since a recall of defective games and cartridges would have a huge cost associated with them.Now it's 'You must install the latest update in order to play this game or use this application..."

I just received an email reply to the ticket I filed with IDrive earlier today inquiring about why my account hadn't been cancelled and why I had received no refund yet. It provided instructions for disabling auto-renewal and said that if I wanted to actually cancel my account that I had to call. But I already called them and spoke to Richard, then nothing happened, which is why I filed the ticket in the first place.I'm sure I will eventually have to call them again to get my account cancelled, but for now I'm going to see what satisfaction I can derive via email.Don't use IDrive.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.