While online backup vendors like SpiderOak are offering discounts for displaced Xdrive users and AOL lists Dropbox, Carbonite and Box.net along with Elephant Drive as replacements for Xdrive users I agree with Matt K Olsen who commented on my last blog post on this issue the Elephant Drive was the best replacement for Xdrive users.Elephant Drive has a backup application like Carbonite or Mozy and secure file sharing like Box.net or Dropbox backed up by a solid infrastructure that stores user data in multiple locations including Elephant's own servers at collocation centers and Amazon's S3. The specialists may have richer user interfaces and more features but Elephant covers the bases.

But Xdrive users should flock to Elephant's Trunk Drive feature that like Xdrive lets Windows users map a drive letter to Elephant's cloud storage.

Even better Elephant is the only vendor I'm aware of that has a direct data migration offer for Xdrive users. As Elephant's CEO Michael Fisher explained to me "We have an access API and so did XDrive so we just wrote an app that uses both APIs to transfer data from their cloud storage to ours without having to run it through the customer's PC" which could be a big deal for users with a lot of data and/or asymmetrical links that make uploading slow.

All an Xdrive user has to do is load the migration page and enter their Xdrive userID and password. Elephant even uses Amazon's EC3 infrastructure to run the transfer so there's no shortage of compute power to run the transfer.