Idrive express Review 2-2026

Idrive is a cloud backup company that's been around a while. They seem to be the most full featured backup company with many different services and supports all platforms. 

They have a service called Idrive Express:

Idrive express is a service to where you can request an external hard drive to seed your data on and then send it back to them and they upload it to your account and you can save months of uploading from a very slow connection like mine is. My upload speeds are 10MBps on a good day. 

Was a bit annoying at first because I had some logistical issues and I got it sorted. Shipped quick even with snow storms around. 

For Linux they recommend using the perl script but I had an error and I went on the live chat and the rep told me to just use the GUI and to choose "local backup" and point to the drive. 

Drive used was a Seagate Expansion 20TB and it had very fast transfer speeds almost maxing out as much as my Seagate Exos X18 16TB. Nice. 

Here's a video of it during the transfer! I made the music too. It's my track titled EXT4 and it's quite fitting, as it's the Linux filesystem I use.  

Transfer of 8.8TB data completed in 25 hours. Files and directory structure are fully encrypted and are fully obfuscated and you can't see directory names or file names or contents. So no worries in transit.

I safely removed the drive  and sent it to one of their datacenters. Got there quick and they got to it a day after they got it. Took 8 days in total so not too bad. Sure beats wating months over my 10MBps upload speed connection! 

Did the incremental backup and it only uploaded the changes. I did have to redo my backup set since they don't do that for you after the express upload. Not too big of a deal. 

Overall I highly recommend idrive and  their express drive seeding offering for those with upload caps and bad upload speeds.