Internxt Drive review: Fantastically affordable storage, sync, and backup

Best Prices Today: Internxt Drive online backup

Though Internxt Drive rightfully touts its 256-bit encryption and dedication to privacy, there’s no feature in particular that sets it apart from the crowd. As with services such as Dropbox, Sync.com, OneDrive, iDrive, etc. there’s sync and storage. There’s also backup, though it’s not true inviolable backup, but mirroring.

Internxt presents its features in a largely intuitive fashion, but what wholly distinguishes itself from the hoi polloi are its incredibly affordable lifetime plans.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best online backup services for comparison.

How much is Internxt?

When I last reviewed Internxt, I said you might want to hop on its super-affordable lifetime plans before they disappeared. Happily, here we are two years later, and Internxt lifetime plans are still imminently affordable — albeit a bit different than before. Read this discussion carefully.

I first tried the free plan with 1GB of storage (formerly 2TB). Sadly, you can no longer increase the free plan’s capacity to as much as 10GB through various actions such as inviting friends to the service.

Beyond that, things have changed a bit since my last look in 2023. Gone are the $0.89-per-month 20GB and $3.49-per-month 200GB plans. Subscriptions now start at $1.65 a month for 1TB and $3.30 monthly for 3TB billed annually. Mind you, these rates are discounted from $10.99 and $21.99 per month, respectively, and might not last. Those prices are also approximate and subject to change as they reflect conversion to dollars from Euros.

So Internxt can be a tad pricey on an annual basis when not on sale. But if you’re willing to commit for life (is that even a thing anymore?) Internxt morphs into uber-affordable. See below. (Note that all stated prices are even lower using the links to purchase in this review.)

If you’ve priced online storage at any time, these lifetime deals are eye-popping. As mentioned, the 3TB forever plan (assuming the company lasts, of course) is only a bit more per-gigabyte than I pay for 1TB with OneDrive for two years.

As to the company lasting, while I hate to be that guy, my job description requires that I point out that Internxt is now only five years old and online storage is a very competitive landscape.

That said, I made that same caveat two years ago, when the company was just three years old, and it’s still here. It’s reassuring that the company employs the well-known OVH storage infrastructure. Worst case, your data will still be available for download after any corporate failure, and the lifetime pricing is more than worth a roll of the dice in my book. My being particularly risk-averse makes that a hearty endorsement.

Note that features vary with the cost of the plan, not surprisingly. Most notably, the backup function is not available for free accounts.

If you’ve priced online storage at any time, these lifetime deals are eye-popping.

Internxt Drive features

Internxt’s features are basically four-fold: sync, backup, sharing, and a recent addition — antivirus. The first three are located in a menu tree to the left of the web interface, and also the Internxt desktop app which resides in the system tray. The AV is only available in the local client, while sharing is done online.

Syncing works like services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. You drag or add files to a local folder/virtual drive that Internxt created, and they’re synced between your devices and the Internxt online storage. There are apps for iOS and Android.

The pay plans also let you create a backup plan that will fire off automatically at a rate as granular as one hour. Add any files or folders that you want backed up regularly, set the schedule, and forget about it. Backups don’t sync.

Though I stupidly referred to it as such in my first review, Internxt’s backup isn’t true backup. A true backup is never altered, using versioning to reflect changes. With Internxt, any files that change overwrite older files. This is actually a form of one-way sync known as mirroring.

The company is considering versioning (saving older files) but has not implemented it at the time of this writing. I’ve never needed it, and for most users, current-state backup will be fine.

As mentioned, Internxt now includes antivirus with the paid plans. On both Windows and my Mac it proved extremely thorough — and aggressive. One scan registered 114 percent when I stopped it. I appreciate enthusiasm, but let’s stop at 100 percent please.

I clicked on the above notice with some trepidation, fearing it would simply trash files out of hand. However, it only takes you to a list that you can then select items from. There is no quarantine, only remove. Be doubly sure before you remove stuff. There’s also a custom scan that will let you narrow the scope to a single drive or folder.

The antivirus is also very aggressive, so be careful — there were quite a few false positives. Actually all them were, though I understand why most were selected.

Internxt has ditched the Photo backup I tested for the last review, although you can still upload photos from your phone’s camera roll to the Family folder. For free accounts this is limited to 25 files per operation. Yup, a teaser.

There’s also a separate section where shared files are kept—i.e., files shared with others, not among the Internxt sections. The separation reduces user confusion, even if it might waste a bit of space due to duplication.

How easy is Internxt Drive?

I’ve never seen an easier sign-up than Internxt. Provide your email, enter a password a single time, and you’re online with two sync folders (Family, Personal) ready to go. There’s an email verification to remove the yellow exclamation point next to your account level, but…

The layout and overall structure of the website make it very easy to set up and use. As easy, or easier than any I’ve experienced. It’s got a clean look as well. The help that I complained about last time is also improved.

But the app, while easy once you know it, is not particularly intuitive. Who looks for the backup function under “Preferences”? Maybe “Settings”… Then there’s “Change folders” for your backup when “Add/Remove folders” would be much clearer. And of course there’s the aforementioned paranoia-inducing “Remove Malware” button. To be fair, these might be translation issues as Internxt is in Europe.

Open the Windows app after it’s installed, and there’s an icon to take you to the local Internxt sync folder. It’s on your C: drive in the same location as your user folders (Documents, etc.), but the name is a rather verbose affair with a hash value tagged on — “InternxtDrive – b44b4d7a-a509-4fd8-98d6-14429611abaa” in my case.

I suppose the hash is to allow multiple accounts on the same PC, as I logged on as three different users and two more of these folders appeared, but it’s an ugly naming convention.

Overall, I give Internxt a B+ for its interfaces. They’re good-looking and functional, though there’s certainly room for improvement.

How does Internxt Drive perform?

Internxt fixed at least one of the bugs I spotted last time. Formerly, when adding the folder “1. Midi files” the folder showed up in the list as “1” and wouldn’t back up because it couldn’t be found. No such error now occurs. I also didn’t see any false error messages during backups. Nice.

Sync across devices was generally fine performance-wise, though I didn’t go much beyond 1GB of files. Uploading photos from my iPhone was rather tedious with each one being encrypted. I didn’t see a setting to disable encryption.

Backups also went off without a hitch on both Windows and the Mac for over a week, so I give Internxt an A for reliability.

Speaking of logs, Internxt keeps them and provides a link in the app, but they contain every operation. There should be a separate log for errors so you don’t have to search through 10MB of text to find them. The Mac client at least divides the logs into separate tasks.

Also, I’d love more granular info on what and how much data has been copied. It seemed when I had two folders selected for backup, it considered the job 50 percent complete when one folder was copied, even though it was only 10MB while the remaining one was 7GB.

Internxt should also implement bandwidth throttling. Backups came too close to maxing out the upstream traffic for my taste, slowing or creating issues for other tasks on occasion. I connect to the software Test Bed using Microsoft Remote Desktop and I was continually kicked off by Internxt backups.

One thing I noticed was that Internxt doesn’t copy zero-byte files. If you sometimes use the name of a zero-byte file as a label for the contents of a folder or some such, it won’t be copied. This should be optional.

Success is always the bottom line, and all the backups and syncs completed, so good on ya’, Internxt. But more info would be appreciated.

Is Internxt Drive worth it?

There’s no way around the fact that Internxt’s discounted lifetime plans are the flat-out steal in the industry at the moment. The client software could use some grooming, but hey, it works and it’s the best online storage deal in town for the long term.

Further reading: How PCWorld tests cloud backup services