Icedrive review: Slickly implemented online storage with sync and backup

Price When Reviewed

$6 per month for 1TB

Best Prices Today: Icedrive online storage

There are a lot of choices in online backup these days, so users can pick and choose the easiest and most affordable. Icedrive competes well on both fronts — proving to be one of my favorites to use. This is my second review of the service, with a look at some features that were formerly in beta. Color me impressed.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best online backup services to learn about competing products.

What are Icedrive’s features?

As with any online storage vendor, Icedrive’s primary feature is providing an offsite repository for your files. However, it also sports collaboration features such as file sharing, public links, and file requests (others asking to see your files).

In addition to its facility for syncing files, Icedrive’s client-side software provides an optional virtual drive. You can change the drive letter but it defaults to I: (Icedrive, “I:”, get it?), which is good enough in my book.

The virtual drive acts as a local portal to your online files, as well as an encrypted folder that utilizes a secondary password or passphrase that you define. Icedrive doesn’t have access to this passphrase, so don’t lose or forget it.

iOS and Android apps are also provided, so you can back up your phone or other mobile devices. My one caveat here is the lack of a Sync tab as on the Windows client. Instead mobile backups (it’s not traditional sync) are defined under the settings tab — the last place I looked.

Speaking of such, in addition to the two-way syncing virtual drive, Icedrive’s Windows client offers what it calls “Full sync” and “Backup.” The former is two-way sync and the latter is one-way sync. Both use versioning, which is a bit odd for two-way sync.

File versioning can serve as a kind of ad hoc backup: Older files are kept just in case. Icedrive does it better than most. Instead of moving the older file to a visible sub-directory, or renaming the older file and leaving it in plain view (this can get messy with a lot of versions), it retains the files out of sight.

Sync is enhanced with the choice to delete files locally (or not) after they are deleted online (mirroring the online version), and to delete files online (or not) after they were deleted locally (mirroring the local data repository). Select both and you’re in effect doing “Full sync,” or two-way sync.

Alas, the delete options are not available on a per-sync job basis — they apply to all sync pairs.

Icedrive offers an online document preview feature that handles many common types. PDF, JPEG, MP3, Wave, and even FLAC/OGG/M4A (lossless included) play just fine, so an A for audio file support. It still, however, will not correctly display my Excel spreadsheets.

No editing of said documents is available, so if you’re looking to work online, Icedrive is likely not your cup of tea. At least for now. That said, Icedrive doesn’t make claims in this regard. As simple storage with easy access, it’s a winner.

How easy is it to use Icedrive?

Icedrive is easy to get up to speed with, once you understand all the sync/backup options. If you know the ins and outs of sync already, that shouldn’t take long.

The Icedrive virtual drive for macOS and Linux relies on the public domain macFUSE driver — a separate download. OpenDrive for Apple machines also relies on this macOS extension, which seems to work well.

To access your encrypted folder from the “local” I: drive, you must enter the passphrase online, then open the local client and under the Mount tab, choose Crypto Lock, and enter the passphrase. Simple, and after that, it’s all transparent.

Dragging a few files to the IceDrive Virtual Drive is certainly the easiest way to upload them, but there’s local caching going on so you can eat up disk space (especially important with internal SSDs) in a hurry.

You can move the cache file to an external location, and there’s also an “upload” context menu option that bypasses the major caching and copies the files directly online.

Sadly, this context menu item is not available for the Mac. On that platform you’ll need to upload using a sync pair to avoid local caching.

Note that you can set the online storage as read-only if you want to be sure files don’t get mucked up.

How much does Icedrive cost?

The five-year plans that the company once featured are gone, while the monthly and yearly options remain. Simpler is generally better when you’re trying to support a large number of users, no doubt.

The monthly plans as of this writing are $8 for 1TB and $20 for 5TB, while annual prices at the time of this writing are: $29 for 2TB (discounted from $99), $49 for 4TB (discounted from $159), and $99 for 6TB (down from $269).

The discounted yearly plans I saw are outstanding values and there’s always the free 10GB plan (without the encrypted folder) so you can kick the tires.

Note that the discounts are only good for the first year you use the service, and the above offers may only be temporary. Don’t just click blindly through on my reporting. And while the discounted plans are excellent deals, the normal fees are on the pricey side.

How does Icedrive perform?

Any online storage service will of course be limited to the upload/download bandwidth of your broadband connection. That said, the program was quite speedy in my testing under Windows, and without throttling the rest of the system. It also found new versions of files quickly and synced them to the cloud in darn close to real time. Nice.

The experience was largely the same with the macOS version, with the exception that the IceDrive client tended to thwart my attempts to shut down the computer. I had to use “Force quit” on the program on several occasions. Also, the “pause backup” button was sometimes less than responsive. Basically, the Mac client needs to poll the system for OS commands more often. No biggie, but annoying.

Should you sign up for Icedrive?

Icedrive is easy to use, versatile, and its pricing is quite competitive — when discounted. Drop a half star from the rating at the normal prices. But it’s still definitely worth a look-see.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.

Best Prices Today: Icedrive online storage

Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Contributor, PCWorld