Door with chain

Both Bitcasa Drive and Copy.com are shutting down in May. These aren’t the first cloud storage services to shut down and leave their users hanging, and they likely won’t be the last. If you’re wondering where you should put your data after they’ve closed, you’ll be happy to know that there are many suitable alternatives to these services.

Free Cloud Storage

Free cloud storage is all the rage. If you want to upload a school or work document, or share a simple family photo album, there’s no need to spend money on an expensive paid service. Most people don’t need terabytes of storage to sync and share files. Many cloud services can fit your needs, with a cost of zero.

Cloud backup appsBacking up your data is important for any iPhone user. This can be done using iTunes and iCloud. iTunes handles the local backups, and iCloud handles the cloud backups. However, not everyone wants to use iCloud, due to concerns about the privacy of data stored on Apple’s servers. It can also be easier to use the same service to back up iOS devices that you use to back up desktop computers, and iCloud doesn’t support Linux or Android.

PenguinBacking up Linux computers has always been a bit of a pain. Sure, there’s Déjà Dup, a graphical wrapper for backup tool duplicity. And then there’s rsync, which is great for transferring files over SSH connections. But these tools require you to set up an FTP server (or other location) for offsite backups. Not everyone wants to do that.

IDrive is an online backup service that can backup desktop computers and mobile devices, all on the same account.  IDrive gives users 5GB free to backup photos, videos, and contacts on your mobile device.  An unlimited backup plan is available for $4.99/year, with a limit of 5 mobile devices.  IDrive customers on the personal or business plans can backup their mobile devices at no additional charge.

In this article, I’ll show you how to backup your iPhone with the IDrive mobile app.

Online backup service IDrive recently added disk imaging support, and now lets users create disk images on local media.  For those who don’t know, disk images let you restore your entire hard drive to the state it was in when the backup was made.

I wanted to put this new feature to the test, so here’s my hands-on experience with it.