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
Read more!
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
Read more!
