I found this new service called Elephant Drive. With the advertising of unlimited online storage my ears perked up and I clicked the link. Apparently this new service is being offered by Amazon.com and is currently in the beta stages. According to the website, while Elephant Drive is in beta the service will be free but once it goes live there will be a fee involved for most of the accounts with the option to have a limited but free account. Since this service is currently free, lets take advantage of some free space and check this program out.
The Trunk
Once you sign up for your Elephant Drive you will need to download their client called the Elephant Desktop. With this program you will be able to access your “Trunk”. The Trunk is your online storage which comes out to a decent 5GB. Ideally this program was created to backup critical files on your computer and store them in a safe place however, you can use the service to store anything you desire. For this review I decided to store 3GB of photos and to see how easy it would be for me to access these files once they were uploaded.
Installation and Backup
Before you get all excited you should know that Elephant Drive requires the Dot Net 1.1 Framework so if you haven’t got that installed, you will need to download it. Once you have everything installed and in place you can go about configuring your backups. Since I knew what files I wanted to backup, I simply clicked Backup Options>Create Custom Backup>Select Folder. With the folder selection window open, I browsed for the specific Pictures folder and then hit “Save and Run”. Immediately Elephant Desktop began to encrypt and upload my files to my Trunk. From the main menu, I then clicked Reports and Activity>Current Activity>Upload Activity and I began to monitor my upload progress. The first thing I noticed was how random my upload speed was. The upload would range from 1.94KB/s to 116.97KB/s which meant uploading 3GB could take a very long time. I am not sure what was affecting my uploading performance but I can safely say it was dismal. I can only speculate that their servers were being loaded heavily which caused my uploading to spike so much.
Interface
Currently there are two interfaces available for you to browse your trunk. You can either use the Elephant Desktop that is accessed from the main menu by clicking Find Files and Folders>Browse your Trunk which then lets you view the various saved files by host computer. The other interface is accessed by right clicking the Elephant Drive icon in your system tray and selecting the Trunk Explorer. The Trunk Explorer features a click-and-drag interface which is much easier to use than the double click interface within the original desktop interface. I found second interface to be the easiest of the two becaus it mimics the Windows XP GUI and makes using it seem very natural.
Features
For being a simple program there are a decent amount of useful features. You can schedule Elephant Drive to perform a daily, weekly, or monthly backup. To increase your security you can choose to run two types of encryption using either something called Elephant or Personal Keys. I have not been able to tell a difference between these two keys, CPU utilization stays at 0% and memory consumption hovers between 43MB and 44MB. Restoring your files can be very easy, simply clicking two buttons and the files will be restored to the original folder. I don’t know if it will create the folder if it no longer exists, but once my upload has finished I will move the files and try to restore them.
Conclusion
If I had this service when my operating system died on me last week I might have recovered all the work I lost. If Elephant Drive maintains a free service with limited storage totaling 5GB or so then I will definitely keep using this program to backup my most sensitive material and current work. If you are in a field where you need some form of redundancy this could be the perfect service if you don’t need to backup your work every day. Once I buy a MacBook I will try installing Elephant Drive on Windows XP and see if I can use Elephant Drive to transfer files between computers. If this is possible, it might be a great program to synchronize multiple computers with the same documents. Elephant Drive offers a great service and with no current fee I would have to recommend everyone to check it out.
Elephant Drive Review
The Trunk
Once you sign up for your Elephant Drive you will need to download their client called the Elephant Desktop. With this program you will be able to access your “Trunk”. The Trunk is your online storage which comes out to a decent 5GB. Ideally this program was created to backup critical files on your computer and store them in a safe place however, you can use the service to store anything you desire. For this review I decided to store 3GB of photos and to see how easy it would be for me to access these files once they were uploaded.
Installation and Backup
Before you get all excited you should know that Elephant Drive requires the Dot Net 1.1 Framework so if you haven’t got that installed, you will need to download it. Once you have everything installed and in place you can go about configuring your backups. Since I knew what files I wanted to backup, I simply clicked Backup Options>Create Custom Backup>Select Folder. With the folder selection window open, I browsed for the specific Pictures folder and then hit “Save and Run”. Immediately Elephant Desktop began to encrypt and upload my files to my Trunk. From the main menu, I then clicked Reports and Activity>Current Activity>Upload Activity and I began to monitor my upload progress. The first thing I noticed was how random my upload speed was. The upload would range from 1.94KB/s to 116.97KB/s which meant uploading 3GB could take a very long time. I am not sure what was affecting my uploading performance but I can safely say it was dismal. I can only speculate that their servers were being loaded heavily which caused my uploading to spike so much.
Interface
Currently there are two interfaces available for you to browse your trunk. You can either use the Elephant Desktop that is accessed from the main menu by clicking Find Files and Folders>Browse your Trunk which then lets you view the various saved files by host computer. The other interface is accessed by right clicking the Elephant Drive icon in your system tray and selecting the Trunk Explorer. The Trunk Explorer features a click-and-drag interface which is much easier to use than the double click interface within the original desktop interface. I found second interface to be the easiest of the two becaus it mimics the Windows XP GUI and makes using it seem very natural.
Features
For being a simple program there are a decent amount of useful features. You can schedule Elephant Drive to perform a daily, weekly, or monthly backup. To increase your security you can choose to run two types of encryption using either something called Elephant or Personal Keys. I have not been able to tell a difference between these two keys, CPU utilization stays at 0% and memory consumption hovers between 43MB and 44MB. Restoring your files can be very easy, simply clicking two buttons and the files will be restored to the original folder. I don’t know if it will create the folder if it no longer exists, but once my upload has finished I will move the files and try to restore them.
Conclusion
If I had this service when my operating system died on me last week I might have recovered all the work I lost. If Elephant Drive maintains a free service with limited storage totaling 5GB or so then I will definitely keep using this program to backup my most sensitive material and current work. If you are in a field where you need some form of redundancy this could be the perfect service if you don’t need to backup your work every day. Once I buy a MacBook I will try installing Elephant Drive on Windows XP and see if I can use Elephant Drive to transfer files between computers. If this is possible, it might be a great program to synchronize multiple computers with the same documents. Elephant Drive offers a great service and with no current fee I would have to recommend everyone to check it out.
Elephant Drive Review
Labels: Online Back up
Elephant Drive was a disaster for me. I paid for the service only to have it hang repeatedly, including some hangs where I had to cold-boot my computer! It crashed constantly (not an exaggeration) including crashing both itself and my operating system. This product was nighmarishly horrible. It is as if the programmers have no regard whatsoever for proper practices in Windows programming.
Then, to add more injury, the program can't even uninstall correctly. Yes folks, it hangs even while uninstalling! First, it was too dumb to end it's own running process before the un-install, which hung the machine, and it went downhill from there. I had to actually re-install the software in order to finish the un-install.
So, I recommend the following steps to get this junkware off your machine.
Here are the un-install instructions:
(1) If you haven't already tried the un-install, great, you can skip this step. If you have already tried the un-install and had difficulty, you will need to re-install the software so that the proper un-install files are put back into place. You can re-install by running the attached installation file (which I have zipped in order to help it get through email filters). You will have to reboot to finish the re-install, but when the website pops up, just close the web browser.
(2) Kill the elephant drive program. To do this, first open your Task Manager (right-click on the task bar at the bottom of your Windows screen to do this). Then, find the image name of "Trunk Drive - Service" and click on it. Then click "End Process".
(3) Now let Windows (not Elephant Drive) uninstall the software.
Do this by going to:
Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs
and clicking on the Elephant Trunkdrive sofware, then "Remove."
(4) Delete any ElephantDrive shortcuts off of your desktop.
Good luck!
Yeah, for a time I was having problems with ElephantDrive, but a little while ago it seems that whatever bugs were causing slow performance were fixed - the support guy who emailed me said the thing was still in beta testing when i was having problems. my girlfriend and i have been using it pretty faithfully for the last year and a half ever since her computer blew and carbonite lost all of her video files (wmvs, etc)...
eh, i dig it.
Sorry for commenting on a old post.
Just want to know, are you still using this service?
I've just discovered this & it looks pretty good to me.
Sorry for commenting on an old post, but ELephant drive is very frustruating. I tried to contact tech support, but there was no response. I will try another service.
I installed Elephant Drive yesterday. There is a 15 day free trial period. I also have experienced the unpredictable upload times. It might charge through 150MB, then crawl for the next 5MB. I have about 10GB to upload so I am dreading this.
If it DOES work as advertised, then I'll be happy to use this service to replace my current backup regime. I may post again in a week or so.