21 hours ago Jan. 9, 2014 - 10:58 AM PST

Uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data can be a slow and tedious process. Thats why cloud backup provider IDrive launched a new service Thursday that replaces that upload with the postman. IDrives new IDrive Safe offering offers small to medium businesses a way to back up their data on one of the companys hard drives, then have it shipped to a managed storage location, and get it sent back if there ever is a need to restore the entire backup.

IDrives staff also makes these drives available online on request, but the data isnt accessible 24/7. IDrives Business Development CoordinatorShane Bingham told me during an interview at CES in Las Vegas this week that the offering was more about offsite backups than about cloud storage, and he suggested that this would be a good solution for businesses that still have a lot of local data, but want some peace of mind with an extra offsite copy.

IDrive Safe is $100 per year for a one-time copy of up to 1TB of data. Businesses that need their data backed up more frequently can elect to get a new drive shipped every month for $1000 per year, and a yearly backup costs $200 per year.Bingham told me that the company employs two people just for managing drive storage, and that it can scale up to manage thousands of drives within days.

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IDrive’s solution to slow cloud backups: a drive shipping service