this morning mine seems to be doing 7-10mbps according to the meter on my router as well as what idrive is reporting. That is still only 10% of what my connection is capable of, but its a speed I can live with if it keeps up. There is still about 1TB more to backup.
The interesting thing is when I first started running this about a week ago it was running VERY fast. It managed to backup ~500gb in just a couple days. After that it slowed way down to about 50gb/day. Right now its going at more like 80gb/day.
Its not clear to me that they are intentionally capping it, but its entirely possible that the way deduplication works on the server side slows down the transfer well below what the the network connection is capable of...especially if there are a lot of people trying to upload to their servers at the same time. Just guessing here.
I had also mentioned to their tech support this morning on email that I was disappointed with the speed... and now its running twice as fast as it was last night...but I don't really know for sure if that is pure coincidence. if they are somehow capping and uncapping, despite claims otherwise, I think it would be good for them to include a "feature" where the first initial upload can happen uncapped and then the incremental backups would happen capped. Having people wait for weeks, or perhaps even months, to get their initial backup online is a big turnoff for a lot of people, but I'd be perfectly fine with capped upload speed once that is over. But if I ever need to restore I'd want full speed download also.
I remember going through all this with Crashplan and lots of complaints over there too. I know somehow I figured out a way to make mine go faster and it worked for me..like I disabled deduplication or something or kept reconnecting until I found a fast server. Can't remember now. Once the intial backup was finished, I really didn't pay attention to the speed at all. I never needed to download the entire thing, but what I did download a few times was plenty fast.
In general, NOBODY should be thinking they will download their entire large archive in the case of emergency. Just as a general note, everyone should have a local backup also and in most cases, restore from that local backup. The cloud backup should be in case your house burns down, nothing else. Or you could use the local backup without versioning, and then use idrive archive to get some version on a certain date of a couple files here or there that you accidentally deleted or something. Or you accidentally blew away your hand crafted MP3 collection...great, you should ahve a local backup first and finally on the cloud just in case your house burns down and in that case you can probably wait a few days to download a few hundred GB's. A backup of your machine to get it working again, should be available at home first...the idrive backup is last place you want to depend on.
I mainly use cloud backup to store backups of my mission critical documents, whatever they may be. I figure if my house burns down I will be buying new computers anyway, no point in backing up the whole computer there. Backup the whole computer locally.