9/10
Website:	http://www.adrive.com/
Contact:	http://www.adrive.com/contactus/support
Phone:	N/A
Location:	United States
Cost:	Free Basic Account/Premium starting at $2.50/m
Year Founded:	2007

 

ADrive Review

Do you travel a lot? Do you wish you didn’t have to deal with pesky flash drives and CD-RWs all the time? Well, have you ever heard of cloud storage?

The concept behind the cloud storage services provided by ADrive is that it constantly backs up content from your main PC/laptop and then places it on the cloud. The beauty is that you can access the cloud from anywhere and at any time. Even cooler is that it can store any type of file:

Only one question remains: is ADrive worth the investment?

Introducing ADrive

Back in 2007, a team of storage and networking veterans came together and founded ADrive to meet the ever changing demands of the expanding data-storage market. It has since grown into a full-fledged backup service that offers backup storage, file sharing, remote file transfers, online editing and more. We highly recommend it for those of you who are seeking cloud backup solutions, whether for personal or business purposes.

Personal Basic Service

The Personal Basic service is completely free and entitles you to 50GB of online data that you can access anytime and from anywhere, including even mobile devices. It is somewhat limited compared to its paid alternatives, but it does still offer some nice features:

• You can share files on your cloud storage account with anybody by just sending them a link. This is a lot easier than doing a peer-to-peer file transfer.
• You can upload entire directories and folders, which is useful for making backup copies of software apps and whatnot.
• You and your coworkers or employees can edit office docs, spreadsheets and slideshows directly from your account using ADrive’s Zoho technology.
• You can utilize international characters in the naming of your files. This is mainly useful for international customers.
• You can access the server from Android and iOS mobile devices, which is extremely useful for today’s smartphone customer.

Unfortunately, there are many things it does not support, such as SSL encryption, online collaborations, FTP and more. For these, you’d have to upgrade to a Personal Premium or Business account. However, the free option is still recommended for the average individual who just wants to safeguard his or her files. Note also that using the free version also means contending with lots of annoying advertisements.

Personal Premium Service

The Personal Premium service provides between 100GB and 10TB of storage space, with prices ranging from as little as $2.50 a month up to a whopping $250.00 per month. We recommend signing up for 1TB of space at a yearly rate of $250.00.

More importantly, it adds along a bevy of very, very useful features and functions:

• First, you can upload and download file sizes up to 16GB. The majority of files are not even close to this size, so this feature pretty much covers everything.
• You can access and transfer files to your drive using SCP, SFTP, Rsync over SSH and FTP. You can also set up SSH keys for better security.
• You can retrieve previous versions of old files within a 7-day period. The site basically takes a snapshot of all your files once per week.

• You can directly map your online cloud drive to your home computer drive using an easy-to-use tool known as WebDAV.
• Up to ten people can access your drive at the same time. This is especially useful if you plan to use your drive for business purposes.
• You get access to a custom desktop application that you can use to conveniently manage your drive without having to open up a browser window.
• All data transactions to and from the drive are encrypted with SSL, a high-grade protocol that ensures your data remains safe and confidential.
• You can set share permissions to expire at a certain time. This way customers and/or clients won’t be able to access certain files after a certain date.

We recommend this service for those of you who have a LOT of files. We are mainly talking about folks who keep humongous collections of videos, songs and pictures on their computers. It would be wiser to store them on a safe system like that provided by ADrive.

Business Service

The Business account ups the storage quantity from 200GB to unlimited. Furthermore, it allows for multiple user accounts. The 200GB option supports 10 users, while the higher-up options support 25, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and more users. It is in all other ways equivalent to the Personal Premium service, and it is only recommended for small businesses. Larger businesses and corporations should go the enterprise route.

Enterprise Service

ADrive also offers enterprise-grade cloud storage solutions for extremely large corporations. The service basically nullifies the need for a company to set up its own data center. Instead ADrive sets up and manages the data center for the company. To get more information (including pricing) on its enterprise solutions, you’ll need to contact the company direct.

Additional Features & Benefits

The wide array of features and benefits at ADrive is quite impressive.

• It uses only state-of-the-art data centers to house its servers. Plus, it relies on dedicated fiber lines, meaning potential lag is never an issue.
• The entire cloud system hosts super levels of redundancy. This means that there is no one single point of failure.
• Data is mirrored across multiple servers located in different geographic portions of the world. This provides even more redundancy.
• All servers comes with the very best antivirus, antimalware and antihacker software suites and applications.
• All data is backed up daily and made available to you for a period of two days in case you need retrieve something.

Impressive Customer Service

ADrive’s customer care is beyond impressive, assuming of course that you have a paid account. If you only have a free one, then you are limited to email support, a huge FAQ and a user forum. There are also dozens of helpful videos and articles. If you have a paid account, however, then you get access to 24/7 phone support with very well-trained and helpful support agents.

If you get a free account and run into any problems, we recommend first checking out the forum and FAQ. Most likely, your question has already been asked and answered by somebody else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

Overall, we found ADrive to be a first-rate cloud storage service for both consumers and business professionals. It provides both basic, free service for the average individual, as well as corporate-grade features and functions for high-end clients. Even better, it offers fair, budget-friendly prices and a slew of storage size options.

ADrive also offers incredible redundancy, topnotch security and out-of-this-world customer service. It impressed us in every way imaginable, and so if you want to keep your data backed up and readily available, then we definitely recommend ADrive!