Getting Started With ADrive Business

Its vague pricing means, for a large number of users or space, it shall be necessary to contact the company directly for a quote. While all of this adds up to a low-cost solution, ADrive Business' lack of advanced options, security, and administration tools keep it behind our Editors' Choice winners in both the storage category, where our leaders are Dropbox Business and Egnyte Business, as well as our cloud backup category where the Editors' Choice goes to Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct.

ADrive Business offers a simple signup process as all that's needed is an email address and password. Once logged in, you can access an online file manager by clicking on "My Files." Alternatively, ADrive Business provides connection strings for a wide variety of file transfer protocols. While it's possible to route to your storage area without using the dedicated ADrive Business client, based on our testing, you'll want all of your users to download ADrive Desktop. This is the backup, sync, and remote drive client that works on Windows and OS X. For Linux users, FTP, Rsync, SCP, and SFTP are connectivity options but there's no native sync client beyond this. This means no administrative capability over such clients, either. Not a deal-breaker for many of the Penguin People but not much of a draw either.

Sync conflicts are resolved interactively with a dialog box. Synchronization will stop until a decision is made on how to resolve the conflict. Many times, this is a welcome opportunity to correct a situation that couldn't otherwise be fixed via an automated or policy-based process. But, more often than not, it's just annoying. A simple file rename is the preferred route and it would be nice to see this in future iterations. ADrive Business also features an elegant backup app that works by using an incremental method only similar to

Sharing and Collaboration

ADrive Business has a variety of sharing and collaboration methods. First, files can be shared internally by specifying collaborators. These can be added or removed at the folder or subfolder level so you can achieve a fair degree of granularity. Despite this, there isn't an option to define user groups. As such, users must be individually added or removed from folders. In addition, files and entire folders can be shared publicly by clicking the "Share" action under a folder or a file's submenu. There are a number of nice options available here. You can specify a password and expiration date, and that way, you can constrain access to only intended individuals. As an added bonus, a download limit can be set so that the file can only be downloaded a certain number of times.