Elephant Drive Review
- Features
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- Likes
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- Dislikes
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- User Reviews
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- Where to Buy
Editor’s Rating:
Avg. User Rating:
| Overall |    |
| Ease of Use | |
| Features | |
| Value for Money | |
| Customer Service | No Ratings |
Elephant Drive Review Summary
Pros
- Both "set it and forget it", as well as advanced settings options
- Option to specify documents to backup by document type
- 2 computers for $9.95/mo for 100GB
- family plan for $19.95/mo for 5 computers & 500GB
- speed – one of the fastest services availabe by far
- No Credit card needed for Free Trial
- 2GB Free – Unlimited time
Cons
- 1GB max file size for Personal users / 2GB for Family
- JRE 1.5 and above required for both PC & Mac
Bottomline
Elephant Drive is another online storage provider with more advanced features like file sharing, mapped drive/external drive support, drag and drop backup functionality, and file versions for a minimum of 30 days. However some may be a bit put off with their file size limits and need for Java RunTime Environment.
Elephant Drive Features/Benefits
Elephant Drive utilizes Amazon’s Web Sevices S3 technology, so customers can be assured they are dealing with two companies known for their reliability, security, and customer service. This company provides the most flexibility for users who want to be able to “tweak” their backup settings to meet their specific needs and requirements, however it also has a simple “set it and forget it” mode for the majority of users as well.
| Pricing Home: | Lite(2GB): FREE for 1 Computers Personal(100GB): $9.95/month for 2 Computers Family(500GB): $19.95/month for 5 Computers |
| Pricing Business: | 50GB: $25/mo up to 1TB: $415/mo unlimited computers |
| Storage Space: | based on plan purchased |
| Free Trial: |
Yes, Get a 15 Day Elephant Drive Free Trial – no credit card required |
| Type of Backup: | Scheduled or during System Idle Time |
| File Sharing: | Yes – Elephant Drive allows both private and public file sharing. This allows you to share your files via Twitter and other social networks if you so choose. |
| File Version History: | Yes – Elephant Drive will keep a minimum of 30 days of previous versions of your files. |
| Support for Mapped Drives: | Yes – Elephant Drive provides full support for mapped/networked drives. |
| Support for External Drives: | Yes – Elephant Drive provides support for backup of external/usb hard drives. |
| Individual File Size Limits: | Home: 1GB & 2GB Business: 5GB |
| How Long are Deleted Files Kept: | unlimited |
| Customer Service: | Phone/Email – Customer service is a top priority for Elephant Drive. |
| Refund Policy: | No Refunds so make sure to test out the Free Trial first. |
| More Info: | Make Sure to Compare Online Backup Services for Additional Plan Statistics |
Likes
Plans for Everyone: Elephant Drive has 3 main paid plan setups – 2 in the home space, and then several in the enterprise area depending upon storage space required. In the home space they have a personal plan for home users with 1 or 2 computers and basic backup needs, then a family plan that allows you to backup up to 5 computers and up to 500GB of data and files. In the enterprise space their plans range from $25/mo for 50GB on up to $415/mo for 1TB of backup storage. All plans allow for file sharing, and any number of ways of configuring your backup.
Backup Speed: In various testing scenarios Elephant Drive performed much better than it’s competitors in performing backups, without causing undo system slowdowns. This has been an engineering focus at Elephant Drive and they have been successful in their efforts from the testing we’ve seen. It’s system usage is far less than that of Mozy even using Mozy’s throttle ability, however Elehpant Drive can be a bit of a memory hog – so it is something to be aware of.
Configuration Settings: Elephant Drive gives the advanced user the ability to control their backup and restoration processes at a much more advanced level than any of it’s other competitors. Choose to backup folders or by file types, schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups, view your restored files online and have that piece of mind of knowing exactly what was backed up, restore directly from the web, etc.
Ability to Configure Elephant Drive Truck as Mapped Drive: Elephant Drive TrunkDrive gives you the ability to actually map a drive on your computer(Windows or Mac) and view the contents of your Elephant Drive backup(Trunk) via Windows Explorer or MacOS Finder. It also allows you to directly open the files you have in your Trunk on any Office application, modify them, and save them directly to your Trunk
Drag & Drop Functionality: This is what every backup provider should have! Let’s say you forgot to include a file in your backup, well simply drag it from your computer to your “My Trunk” online and viola it begins to backup.
Easy File Sharing: Simply highlight a file in “My Trunk” and select “share”. However there isn’t any public sharing available – meaning a person must have an Elephant Drive account to in order to see the shared file.
Mac Support: With Elephant Drive you now get an easy drive mapping application to allow for easy upload/download of your data through Windows Explorer or Mac OS X Finder. This is in addition to the desktop application that allows you to schedule your backup, restore, as well as upload, download, and share files to and from your trunk.
Dislikes
Individual File Size Limitations: There is a 1GB file size limit for personal users, 2GB for family, and 5GB for entrprise users. This may not be an issue for most home users, but some may run into it as a problem if you are working with large video or multi-media files. It is something to be aware of at the very least.
Customer Service Problematic at times: We’ve seen various customer complaints about being able to get timely responses from customer service support tickets, emails and voicemails in a timely manner. We have not had this issue ourselves, however something to be aware of.
Where to Buy
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Get 2GB of Elephant Drive Free!
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Or Start Your Personal or Family Edition 15 Day Elephant Drive Free Trial!
Summary
All in all Elephant Drive has a strong product offering, based on Amazon’s Web Sevices S3 technology, with a strong technical focus on improving features, speed, and fucntionality to their users.
If you want a provider that will not only offer you a backup solution but also the ability to share files with others, and an abundance of choices for backing up and restoring your data then Elephant is an easy choice.
I had a pre-paid, unlimited account with ElephantDrive for several years that I renewed annually. In 2011 the company sent me a note stating that I was using too much space and that they were cutting off my access to the service. Many emails from me to various elephantdrive employees went unanswered. I lost all of my backup data, including some data that I had no other copy of. In addition, I’m out the balance of my prepaid subscription. The only thing worse than having no backup of your data is to pay a company to keep your backup data and have them not do so. I would not recommend that you trust this company with your data or your money.
@Joe -
Thanks for the positives feedback and apologies for any challenges you are having with the TrunkDrive. The behavior you are describing sounds uncommon, but we would love the opportunity to have our support team work with you to identify and resolve any issues.
If you write to us at support at elephantdrive dot com (sorry – trying to avoid the spammers), our representatives will try to help improve the performance.
This is good backup service. I subscribed specifically at the time because it offered My Trunk to map a drive and the backup space was not limited. I have just learned that the pricing model has changed so that it now costs double and there is a limit, depending on plan, on storage space. I guess some of this can be expected. However, the most disappointing thing is that the My Trunk service has slowed to a crawl. At one time I could load a file 100MB in just a few minutes. It now takes a 10MB file 20 minutes or more to upload. I have tried different computers, different locations (Internet providers) and isolated the issue to Elephantdrive’s slow performance. I have even loaded old and new version to see if it was the software. In any case, it is still a value but they need to fix the slow uploads if they expect users to use the trunkdrive option.
Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the company, so obviously a little biased.
ElephantDrive is known as premium solution, with a number of advanced features available for sophisticated users. If/when you evaluate it against other services, please check out the functions in the “advanced” section like icon overlays.
Also, if you would like a promotional code for reviewing purposes, please just contact us.
@Shiimoan – good call. Some of the info on this page is a little dated (saw after my post). For one, like you noted the prices and plans have changed. But there are other changes too – you don’t need the .NET framework but you do need Java. That’s a total 180, but oh well.
Also, there is a “family” plan now too. Not sure if that even existed before.
The price is the double of what’s listed here – the cheapest subscription costs $9.95.
I have had a great experience with elephantdrive after a very challenging time with one of the others (will remain nameless, but slow speed and slower customer support cause me to look for another). Love the sharing features but still waiting on the ability to automatically delete versions. Basically, excellent bang for your buck.
Thanks Eddie and Shiimoan for the heads up… We will make sure to get this review updated ASAP. It’s so hard to stay on top of all these guys… it seems as if they are coming out with updates and changes to their r plans constantly… but we are going to have to make it a higher priority to stay on top of them!
Thanks again for letting us know… Be on the look-out for the new and updated review.. we will get it up within the next couple of days.
Best,
Lynn and the group at Best Online Backup Deals