Backup forum

Well, the reply from IDrive was most disappointing:

As per the application design You will be able to download only one file at a time and if you wish to download more than one file or folders we recommend you to use the IDrive Desktop app and login and perform restore.

So I replied:

Unbelievable...use "restore" instead of being able to batch download a bunch of files? Unbelievable! I have a second laptop where I need to occasionally download some files from the cloud..."restore" is an absurd way to do that. Plus I don't have the ROOM or the TIME to go through that. Oh well. How about improving your application design?

Last edited by Zeke (2020-08-17 08:18:15)

SteveA wrote:

You don't have to use the Desktop app, you can select multiple files to restore from the online Dashboard. Of course, the target computer has to be online!

I agree with you though, it would be a simple task to implement multiple file download from the Cloud Backup page so why don't they just do it?!

It's ridiculous. I am required to install IDrive to every laptop I want to download a batch of files from, then download many gigabytes just to get a batch of files? Can't use the dashboard in this case. I restore old laptops with Linux for other people, and there are files I have backed up to facilitate the process. But I can only download one file at a time...I tried downloading a folder instead, but that's not doable either. I imagine that personal, non-business users would benefit by the ability to batch download from the cloud, when they have a second system they travel with. Maybe they have a collection of music or photos they'd like to download from the cloud...and doing it one by one is tedious, to say the least. I will have to look for another backup service. Fortunately, I only paid $5 for the first year, and have disabled automatic renewal.

Besides which, even when my main system is online with IDrive, the dashboard still doesn't work. What if I accidentally deleted some files or folders,  or they got lost some other way? Thank god I also backup everything to an external hard drive.

Last edited by Zeke (2020-08-17 18:59:42)

SteveA wrote:

One workaround for this would be to put the files into tgz archives, so you only need to download one file to get a whole directory's worth.
Could prove to be inefficient use of your storage though, if you have the uncompressed and compressed versions up there together.

Good idea, thanks. It will have to be a partial solution, but better than IDrive's cumbersome approach. And the other backup services don't say anything about batch downloading of files and folders, from a web interface...they're not keeping the little person in mind. I'll have to send each one a query. *sigh*

But at least, on my one laptop where IDrive is installed, I can select files and/or folders to "restore." Better than nothing! Just absurd that I can't take a small chunk here and there, from the cloud, and download whatever files I want to another laptop that doesn't have IDrive installed.

Last edited by Zeke (2020-08-17 21:35:21)