I also got my hands on a 30% discount coupon from them, during the order process enter this coupon:NEOB-M5VL

I must say that Idrive is way better than the other two products.

However, what is missing from Idrive/Ibackup is leadership in promoting their products out in the market. Their marketing plan sucks. They hire poor Indians to blog about their products for peanuts and they expect, out of these blogs, that they will sell their products.

To the contrary, Carbonite has been spending millions of dollars taking the subject of online backup to nationally syndicated radio talk shows, by sponsoring, e.g., the Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and other shows. This is a brilliant marketing plan.

Mozy is now acquired by EMC, this means EMC can spend their millions as they have deep pockets to promote Mozy.

I believe that Idrive/Ibackup could emerge in the top if it tries its best to promote their products. Mind you Carbonite and Mozy are fairly new companies compared to Idrive/Ibackup, but any time someone blogs about online backup, only Carbonite and Mozy are mentioned as examples. What does that say?

Idrive/Ibackup claims that they are making profits, but how long will that continue? At their current marketing plans, not for a long time. Other aggressive companies will take over Prosoftnet’s market share.

I think the tech blogs are doing a great job in general; their insights are very useful. They are excellent at analyzing social networking ins and outs, new gadget reviews, cloud storage and the works.

The thing with online storage and backup is that it takes time to study. This is the biggest bandwidth hogger for any Web application. Nothing comes close. Online backup is inherently slow, so to do a proper analysis of a product, it might take days to figure out pros and cons for each product.

So most resort to a quick and dirty review based on published information, ‘noise’ and look and feel.

Even S3, the famed amazon service – amazon only published that they use more resources on this than their main stay services. So what? cloud storage services are infrastructure intensive. That has no relevance on the revenues and the profit potential.

Thanks for showing the other side of the story. There are most definitely exciting businesses to built providing online data services like backup, storage, and access.

The large market opportunity has certainly drawn a great deal of interest and many new entrants, but the fact remains that this is a challenging software service to deliver. It’s easy to provide the solution to 50 or 500 users; it’s challenging to provide to 50,000 or 500,000 users (or many more). We’ve seen a number of failures because many of the entrants simply couldn’t scale.

I’m also glad to see you highlight Raghu and ProSoftNet. As an avid watched of this space, I have often seen Raghu’s justifiably frustrated posts when blogger’s provide detailed coverage of a company that simply issues a press release and has a cool looking interface, without mentioning companies like his that are doing good work. I’ve felt the same sort of frustration myself, as ElephantDrive (http://www.elephantdrive.com) has been providing a rock solid service to a growing paid subscriber base built by a bootstrapped effort.

Raghu – keep up the good work. We would much rather compete against a quality offering that have to fight the growing lack of faith in the online storage space that other failures engender.

Om – keep up the good work. As I said above, it is great to see you present a variety of perspectives on the online backup and storage space. This is what separates GigaOm from the pack.