Labs

IDrive is produced by the company behind IBackup, but it shouldn't be confused with IBackup Drive, a free add-on that lets you map and access your IBackup storage as if it were a hard disk. IDrive is aimed at users with little or no backup experience, but it's surprisingly well specified, particularly as it's available for free with 2GB of storage. A Pro account costs $5 (around £2.50) and gives you 'unlimited' storage,

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subject to a 150GB fair use clause.

Like IBackup, IDrive can make scheduled backups of a data set that you define. Unlike IBackup, it can also make continuous backups in the background, backing up new or changed files every 10 minutes.

IDrive is as easy to use as IBackup, but novices may find it less easy than products such as Mozy or Carbonite, which in effect configure themselves. It's not overcomplicated, though. Scheduling a backup was simple, and while backing up it displayed a progress meter with a pause and throttle. Both backup tests were faster than average.

Unfortunately, restore performance was less impressive. Unlike many of the products here, IDrive Basic can't detect the files that are already on your PC, so you must either select specific files and directories to restore manually, or restore your entire backup. We chose the latter, which saved duplicate versions of existing files with a .1 extension, resulting in a 210MB download. We'd rather pay the money for IBackup.