22 Aug 2026 · Cloud backup

What 5 TB of Cloud Backup Actually Costs After Year One

IDrive advertises 30% off the first year. Its own terms say standard pricing returns in year two. We work out the difference, what pushes you into a bigger plan, and what happens to your backups if you cancel.

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IDrive advertises 30 percent off the first year, or 50 percent off on a two-year plan. Both numbers sit right next to the sign-up button on IDrive's own pricing page.

IDrive itself says something more specific about how long that discount lasts.

The discounted price applies to the first year of the selected plan. Standard pricing will apply from the second year onward.

That second sentence is the one that decides what a 5 TB backup plan actually costs over time. This article works out what that means in dollars, using only the numbers IDrive itself publishes.

What We Read, and What We Haven't Tried

We have not used IDrive to back up a computer. We read IDrive's pricing page and its terms and conditions page, both on 2026-08-22.

We also read the page where IDrive names its own competitors, again on 2026-08-22. We did not visit any of those competitors' sites.

Everything below traces back to one of those pages. Where IDrive doesn't publish a number, we say so instead of guessing at it.

Three Questions Before You Trust a Discounted Price

A first-year discount tells you almost nothing about what a service costs to keep using. Three questions get closer to the real number.

1. What does the plan cost from year two onward?

IDrive publishes both numbers on the same pricing page: the first-year rate and the standard rate it reverts to. The table below uses both.

2. What pushes you into a bigger plan next year?

Capacity, number of computers or users, and an overage charge once you go over your storage limit all appear on IDrive's own pages. We cover each one further down.

3. What happens if you cancel?

IDrive's terms describe a refund window, a separate window for one specific plan type, and what happens to your stored data. We quote the terms directly instead of paraphrasing them.

Personal 5 TB: Year One vs. Year Two

IDrive's annual Personal 5 TB plan lists a standard rate of $9.99 a month, billed once a year. The first-year rate, after the 30 percent discount, is $6.99 a month.

Both figures come from the same table on IDrive's pricing page, retrieved 2026-08-22. Neither is an estimate.

From the second year on, the account is billed at the standard rate unless IDrive changes its pricing. IDrive's own wording is the source for that: standard pricing applies from the second year onward.

The Same Pattern at Every Capacity

The 5 TB plan isn't a special case. Every Personal, Team, and Business annual plan we found on IDrive's pricing page follows the same first-year-then-standard structure.

Team 5 TB happens to list the same two prices as Personal 5 TB. The difference isn't price. It's that Team includes 5 computers and 5 users instead of one.

The Two-Year Plan Complicates the Math

IDrive also sells a two-year commitment at 50 percent off, but it doesn't publish that as a monthly rate. It publishes a single total for both years combined.

IDrive's own terms describe the discount as applying to the first year of the selected plan, and the selected plan here is a two-year term. IDrive doesn't list year one and year two as separate line items inside that total, but its own numbers let us check the split.

We can check that math against IDrive's own numbers. Normal pricing for two years is $239.76, which is $9.99 a month for 24 months. The discounted total is $179.82.

Subtract a full second year at $119.88, 12 months at $9.99, and the first year comes out to $59.94, exactly half of $119.88. So even inside the two-year plan, year one is 50 percent off and year two reverts to the standard $9.99 a month. That matches IDrive's own wording that standard pricing applies from the second year onward.

Paying Month-to-Month Instead

There's a third option: no annual or two-year commitment at all. IDrive's monthly Personal 5 TB plan is $11.99 a month, billed every month.

That's higher than both the standard annual rate ($9.99/mo) and the first-year annual rate ($6.99/mo). Monthly billing costs more per month, in exchange for no upfront commitment.

• Monthly, no commitment: $11.99/mo
• Annual, first year: $6.99/mo
• Annual, year two onward: $9.99/mo

One caveat matters here: IDrive states that discounts are not available for signup from IDrive mobile apps. If you sign up through a phone app instead of the website, don't assume the discounted rate applies.

The no-commitment, monthly rate exists across the whole lineup, not just on the 5 TB Personal plan. IDrive's own monthly pricing table lists these figures directly, with no discount attached to any of them.

What Pushes You Into a Bigger Plan

Three things move you up IDrive's price ladder, based only on what IDrive states on its pricing and terms pages.

• Capacity. Personal plans step from 5 TB to 10, 20, 50, and 100 TB, each at a higher listed price.
• Computers and users. Team plans price by both capacity and seat count. Team 10 TB covers 10 computers and 10 users; Team 100 TB covers 100 of each.
• Overuse charges. IDrive's terms state there may be an overuse charge of $0.25/GB/month for Personal plans and $0.50/GB/month for Team and Business plans once you exceed your plan's storage.

That last one is worded as "there may be," not as a guaranteed flat rate. We're quoting IDrive's own hedge instead of smoothing it into a fixed number.

Add-Ons That Sit Outside the Plan Price

IDrive's pricing page also lists a handful of add-ons priced separately from any of the plans above. None of them are hidden, but none of them show up in the headline monthly figure either.

• Server Backup: $5 per month, per server.
• Microsoft 365 Backup: $20 per seat, per year, with unlimited storage and a 7-day free trial.
• Google Workspace Backup: $20 per seat, per year, with 10 TB of storage per seat and a 7-day free trial.

Server Cloud Backup, which covers things like MS SQL, Exchange, Hyper-V, VMware, and Oracle, is listed as available as an add-on on Mini, Personal, and Team plans. On Business plans, IDrive lists it as standard, not as an add-on. Which plan you're on changes whether that feature is included or billed on top.

If You Cancel

IDrive's terms and conditions describe a specific refund window, and it's short.

Refunds are issued if the account is canceled within fifteen (15) days of its creation date. After 15 days, pro-rated refunds are issued on a case-by-case basis, subject to eligibility.

IDrive doesn't define what makes a case eligible for that after-15-days review, so we're marking that part as unconfirmed instead of guessing at criteria.

One plan type is the exception to the 15-day window: BMR, the plan that ships physical backup hardware, gets thirty (30) days instead of fifteen. IDrive's terms state that distinction separately, and it's easy to misread the two as the same policy. They aren't.

Yearly accounts created after November 23, 2011 can disable auto-renewal instead of canceling outright. IDrive's terms are explicit that doing so forfeits any pro-rated refund for the remaining time on the subscription.

Cancellation also has a consequence for the data itself, stated plainly in IDrive's own terms:

Please note that all of your data will be deleted when your account is terminated.

There's no grace period mentioned for retrieving files after that point. Whatever you want to keep needs to come out before you cancel, not after.

Getting Data Out Before You Cancel: IDrive Express

IDrive Express ships a physical storage device to move a large backup in bulk, instead of downloading it over the internet. IDrive's own wording describes it as a way to back up or retrieve bulk data, within a week, using physical shipment of temporary storage devices sent by IDrive.

For Personal accounts, one Express request a year is free. IDrive's terms list it as free, once a year, with subsequent requests charged $59.95. Team and Business accounts get it three times a year before the same $59.95 charge applies.

We looked for a separate, formal data-export clause in IDrive's terms and didn't find one. Express is the mechanism IDrive documents for moving data at scale. That's a gap worth knowing about before you commit five terabytes to any single vendor.

What We Read, What We Didn't Test

Every number in this article traces back to IDrive's pricing page or its terms and conditions page, both retrieved 2026-08-22.

We did not sign up for an account, run a backup, restore a file, or contact support. We haven't measured upload speed, restore speed, or whether the app itself is pleasant to use day to day. Those would all require actually running the service, and we haven't.

Who IDrive Names As Its Own Competition

IDrive publishes a page comparing itself against other backup and storage services. The names it lists there are Mozy, Carbonite, CrashPlan, Backblaze, Dropbox, Carbonite Business, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and Amazon Drive.

We haven't visited any of those companies' own pages. We're recording that IDrive names them as comparison points, not stating anything about their prices or features, since we haven't checked either.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign Up

These apply to any discounted annual plan, not just IDrive's.

• What's the standard rate this reverts to, and where does the vendor publish it?
• Does a multi-year plan quote a monthly rate, or only a bundled total?
• What's the refund window, and does it differ by plan type?
• What happens to your files the moment the account is canceled?
• Is there a way to get a large backup out in bulk, and what does it cost after the first use?

For a 5 TB Personal plan specifically, the answers we found are: $9.99 a month standard, $6.99 in year one, a 15-day refund window, deletion of all data on termination, and one free bulk retrieval a year before a $59.95 charge applies. All of that comes from IDrive's own pricing and terms pages, retrieved 2026-08-22.

Sources

We earn nothing from this article. Nobody paid us to write it, nobody outside this site reviewed it before publication, and we hold no partnership with IDrive or with any company named in it.