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This overview first appeared in concern 343 of PC Pro.
Companies that don’t need to decide to long-term contracts for cloud collaboration companies ought to take a look at HiDrive from web-hosting firm Ionos. You may select between 4 plans, and all can be found on inexpensive month-to-month contracts so you may cancel them with minimal discover.
Ionos doesn’t supply free trials however you may strive it out for subsequent to nothing, with a one-year HiDrive Enterprise contract at present costing a piffling 50p monthly for 5 customers and 1TB of cloud storage. We needed to see the whole lot HiDrive has to supply so we tried out the Professional plan, which prices £20 monthly, begins with 2TB of cloud storage for ten customers, allows help for the SMB/CIFS, FTP/SFTP, Rsync, SCP and Git protocols, and rounds it off with information backup companies for customers’ private gadgets.
The HiDrive admin portal is straightforward to make use of, and also you create new customers by sending electronic mail invites. For larger security, you may globally allow two-factor authentication (2FA) and assign admin rights to chose customers, though roles aren’t supported so they’ll have full entry to all settings.
After creating their account, customers can obtain the Home windows or macOS desktop syncing app. This labored positive on our Windows 11 shoppers, and the most recent model sees a redesigned interface with simpler entry to all options.
Customers select the cloud folders they need synchronized to their native mapped drive and tips on how to reply when exterior storage gadgets are inserted. Together with encryption of information in flight and at relaxation within the HiDrive cloud servers, the Professional plan allows end-to-end encryption, though that is left within the palms of every person who can select to use this from the desktop app and handle their very own keys.
Gadget backups are additionally managed totally by customers. They will allow this for chosen folders, schedule it to run recurrently and get better information from the app or their very own portal. A priority is that complete cloud storage is just not per person however shared amongst all of them and, as admins haven’t any management over system backups, they’ll have to monitor utilization intently.
HiDrive doesn’t do file versioning, however all plans present computerized backup of cloud information. Admins can run this as typically as each 4 hours, retain information for as much as a 12 months, and customers can entry the backups from their portal and restore chosen objects to a cloud folder or obtain them as ZIP recordsdata.
Every person has a private repository of their portal for creating folders and importing recordsdata to them. They will select to share chosen objects on this space with anybody, together with exterior collaborators, by emailing an internet hyperlink with non-obligatory password safety, learn/write privileges and expiry dates.
Sharing files between workforce members is dealt with by a “Frequent” space within the internet portal. Solely account directors are allowed to create new folders inside this and decide which customers have learn or learn/write entry, after which they grow to be accessible in their very own portal.
No Outlook or Gmail plugins are offered so all sharing and file add requests have to be despatched from the person portal, with the latter limiting most file sizes to 2GB. HiDrive doesn’t combine with any third-party apps, however customers can load fashionable recordsdata akin to Word paperwork or Excel spreadsheets from their portal and edit them in a browser while not having the related app put in.
Small businesses that need easy cloud file-sharing companies will discover Ionos HiDrive Professional ticks numerous containers. App integrations and collaboration instruments are minimal, but it surely’s straightforward to make use of and, though cloud storage is shared, it’s nonetheless comparatively good worth.
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