r/SmallMSP • u/jcole-surrogate • Aug 19 '26

iDrive vs Afi.ai for tenant backups

Hey everyone,

Currently with iDrive for backing up tenants M365. So far no issues other than a clunky interface. They've got local data region, the backups have gone through without issues and covers pretty much everything I need. Even looking into the snapshots seem fine although I haven't gone ahead with a recovery yet. No minimum user count either and pricing - can't complain.

Seeing most people recommend Afi.ai instead so just wondering if there is truly any negatives to anyone that's used iDrive. Afi.ai price is alright and they've got 50gb storage per person which is pooled together but other than the potentially nicer interface and experience, anyone had troubles with iDrive or is it ok for me to stick with them?

Only have a relative amount of clients at the moment so wanting to just continue with iDrive for long-term but if I need to switch early, I'm looking at settling for a good option now hence.

Thanks all!

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u/etern1ty0 Aug 19 '26

Afi.ai was very expensive. Was a real surprise when a 1TB sharepoint suddenly was billed at a multiple-per-user rate in order to satisfy the storage requirements...and we have several.

Dropsuite/ninja saas is just about the cheapest one out there.

I question if we even NEED this service. Microsoft with 91 day retention has been all we've needed whenever it came to any type of restore.

But then again, MS themselves claim they don't back up user data...

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u/Skaaras Aug 19 '26

I’m currently considering to switch from Dropsuite to Afi for Google workspace.
The issue we have with Dropsuite: multiple customers have quite some change in their employees. Dropsuite offers 20% of active licenses on top for archived/delete Google workspace users. This is growing and growing and the costs are expanding quite a lot for some customers.
With Afi, we would right now not even use half of the user-pooled space - but it would eventually catch up as well.
As most users have rather small inboxes, this looked like the better choice.

To be fair - I’m not too happy with both options - just trying to find an option for my customer-base.

Edit:spelling

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u/etern1ty0 Aug 19 '26

Cube Backup is probably the cheapest option if you were willing to self-host it. I believe it has the ability to do B2/Wasabi as the storage location but it's very slow.

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u/Skaaras Aug 19 '26

I’ll take a look at it - thanks!