Installing ElephantDrive on Windows 7
May 1, 2012 by Jim McCarthy 
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Installation was easy and took less than 20 minutes. And now I have my photos backed up offsite, with immediate delta backups whenever I add photos. Sweet!
Note that ElephantDrive offers no option for seeding your backups with physical media, requiring all backups to happen via a net connection. For relatively small backups, this is not an issue, but if you are looking to back up large volumes of data for business purposes, this may be a deal breaker.
Pricing Options
Home accounts start at 100GB for $9.95/month or $99.50/year, and go as high as 2TB for $169.95/month or $1,699.50/year. Enterprise accounts start at 50GB for $25.00/month or $200.00/year for 5 individual users, and top out at 5TB for $1,840.00/month or $14,720.00/year for 100 individual users.
Full Disclosure Alert: I was given a free one-year subscription for 50GB by ElephantDrive to allow me to test and blog about the service.
Overall Assessment
Performance
So far, I like the service. I was able to set up the service quickly and let it do its thing. I can access my files from anywhere I have internet access and a web browser, and ElephantDrive performs delta backups any time I add files to the watched directories on this PC. I can also use this service with my QNAP NAS to keep data on that box automatically backed up. ElephantDrive does what it says it will.
Pricing
$200.00 per year is what ElephantDrive charges for 50GB. Amazon’s S3 service starts at $128.00/month for 1TB of data…the next 49TB would cost $5,519.36/month if you used all of that space. It is clearly aimed at business users and incudes the ability to seed backups with physical media.
SkyDrive costs $25.00/year for 50GB, and Drive is about $30.00 per year for 25GB and $60.00 per year for 100GB. These services do not automate backup for watched directories; they require you to copy data to be backed up to discrete folders, but the difference in cost may be worth that inconvenience.
CrashPlan+ offers unlimited plans for $49.99 per year, and offers the ability to seed your backups with physical media for $164.99 with overnight shipping.
ElephantDrive is a good service, but is priced higher than these competing options. Make sure that you shop on performance and price when choosing a cloud storage option.
I’ll be using ElephantDrive for some time yet, and I’ll update you with my longer-term impressions.
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