Idrive cloud restore speed

I became interested in trying IDrive’s Machine Backup Restore. Currently I have a Windows 10 IDDRIVEIMAGE sitting in my cloud account that measures 167GB. I plugged in a USB3 SSD and started the restore. After 2hrs 45min I had achieved 26% with 7hrs 18 min estimated remaining. Math seems to calculate 37Mbps download. I have a 200Mbps fiber connection that faithfully tests at 190-200Mbps. Curious what other folks have experienced for download speeds from IDrive? They claim they do not bandwidth throttle.

Maybe I should be content with 37 Mbps. Apparently cloud backup/restore services all have restoration bottlenecks. Tom’s Guide review

What speed can the SSD achieve on the USB port? Is it, maybe a slow port?

I have had PCs with USB 3 and some drives/sticks work faster or slower on different USB ports. I think it has to do with the chipset on the USB port and the controller on the drive/stick not playing well together.

This latest attempt was downloading to an onboard SATA spindle drive.

Trying to download a disk image from IDrive appears to be impractical. If there was a real need to retrieve for disaster recovery, probably best to use IDrive Express and ship overnight on SSD.

5-min to download 1GB
200MB per min
27Mbps

Is it possible that you ISP is throttling the restore stream?

I tried recovering from Carbonite. I had around 600GB of data, that took over a week. I did it as an experiment. Cloud backups are a last resort and not a real alternative to an on-site backup, if it is urgent.

I keep a copy of the data on the machine on an HDD (source data is on SSD), regularly synced, from there, synced to NAS, from there to an external drive, I also use Carbonite, in case of a disaster).

This seems like a good recipe for a desktop. What is your recipe for keeping a current bare-metal disaster recovery boot media? Laptops require a different strategy? Modern macOS systems are so much easier since they isolate the OS from data partitions and don’t have to deal with a system registry. macOS restoration is so much simpler than Windows.

I have a USB stick with the latest Windows 10 image on it and the drivers for my laptop and desktop.

Last year, when I tried going Linux, I used Veeam to make a complete backup (all 3 SSDs and the HDD). After 3 weeks, the system still wasn’t running smoothly - seemed to be a motherboard incompatibility - and I ran Veeam restore and I was back up and running in about an hour, just needed to apply the missing security patch.

My latest experiment is running Google Drive Sync to upload the IDDRIVEIMAGE created by iDRIVE. Task Manager showing GoogleDriveSync.exe network usage steady 45 Mbps, a 20% increase over the best I achieved with iDRIVE. Will be interesting to see what the download speed from Google Drive will be. After this round, planning to do the same with OneDrive.

Update: Download speed of the 167GB IDDRIVEIMAGE from Google One drive was sustained 340 - 350 Mbps. This was on a 1Gbps ethernet router connection to a Windows 10 desktop over 1Gbps fiber connection reporting 845 Mbps down 390 up.

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Sounds like Apple is throttling.

Apple not in the mix. This was my Windows 10 desktop machine.

My bad, I keep thinking iDrive is an Apple service. :joy:

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@big_D that reminded me to test upload speed to iCloud Drive. Using same Windows 10 desktop I achieved 12 - 13 MB/s (~100 Mbps).

The winner so: OneDrive using Windows 10 Edge Browser, I am able to saturate my 400 Mbps fiber upload.

Bottom line, cloud storage for me will remain an option to synchronize file data but my drive images still need to stay onsite in a fire proof vault for disaster recovery.

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iDRIVE responded to my support ticket by inviting me to download what they labeled a custom IDriveWinSetup.exe. I now have 4 data streams rather than 1 with default setup. Throughput obviously better. Not sure where the speed variability is, maybe my ISP or maybe limitations of iDRIVE data center. Certainly an improvement.

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