IDrive, one of our favorite cloud backup services, have announced the ability to backup and encrypt the Microsoft Office files resting in your account for $20 a year per user.
Some of you might be scratching your heads: Microsoft’s Office 365 is already integrated with the company’s own cloud storage juggernaut, Microsoft OneDrive. Well, quite. But, with automating AES-256-encrypted backups three times daily, ICloud thinks it can keep your work secure, while freeing you from ‘dependency’ on OneDrive.
We’ll get right to the catches, as revealed in the press release: the ‘unlimited cloud storage’ only applies to files backed up from Microsoft 365 Personal accounts, so it’s not intended to service an entire organization. It also costs $20 a year.
IDrive’s Office 365 backups
There's no surprises in the rest of the offering: preserving snapshots of previous file versions is nothing new, but when IDrive’s doing so three times a day, we’d say that’s about as robust a backup solution as you can get, offering protection from ransomware and the nebulous world of data recovery software.
What we do like as part of the deal is what IDrive are calling ‘granular recovery’, which really just means that you can, if you’d prefer, restore singular missing files rather than a whole backup, which could save you an awful lot of time.
We also can’t fault the logic of making a ‘Cloud to Cloud backup’, as they're calling it, although an additional cost, and having to manage an additional cloud storage service for the privilege sounds like a pain.
Still, if you already have an IDrive and a Microsoft account, it’s not a bad idea. You can even add 365 Personal backups to your IDrive account rather than create a new one.
