Choose your subscription

Picking your plan is simple.

Choose increments of 50, 100, 250, 500, 750, 1000 and now 2000 GBs!

Plus, for every month you stay with Dolly, you get a 5 GB reward. That’s 60 GBs a year free!

Looking at our 1 or 2 TB Accounts? Try our seeding program for fast uploads.

You can send us your data on an external drive via secure overnight mail and our technicians will mount your data directly into our cloud grid. To choose the seeding option, just follow the instructions in your Welcome email once you sign up for Dolly.

Sign Up

Signing up for Dolly Drive takes mere minutes. Plus, there’s no contract. So, in the (completely hypothetical) scenario that you don’t love Dolly Drive, you can cancel at anytime. If you cancel in your first 10 days, we’ll give you a complete refund.

Install

Dolly Drive’s installation process is super easy.

(Do you like the comfort of someone walking you through set up? Try our free Dolly-on-one setup service! Our support pros will guide you through your configuration and installation.)

1. Once you sign-up, you’ll get an email confirmation. Click the link in the email and follow the directions to start your backup.

2. Enter your username and password to authenticate your account. Then click Submit.

3. Click Add Dolly Now. The software will begin to download immediately.

Choosing what to backup

Before your first backup, you can control which folders and files you want backed up in the cloud with the Inclusions Assistant. Dolly Drive is set to automatically include everything, but you can easily select only the documents, files and folders that are most important to you by checking or unchecking the respective boxes in the assistant.

Watch: How to use the Inclusions Assistant

Word of Advice: We know it’s exciting to backup to the cloud, but we recommend that once you download Dolly Drive, you make your clone first if you have an external drive. It’s much faster so you’ll be done in an hour or two, and you’ll have the comfort of knowing you are backed up in one location as soon as possible! Then you can get started uploading to the cloud!

The Initial Backup to the Cloud

It’s very important to be patient during this process. Be prepared that your initial back-up may take a while. It could take hours, days, even a week or two to complete. It’s one reason we suggest you create a clone first.

On average, people back up 4-8 gigabytes of data per day. Some people get lucky and it goes faster but expect that it will go about that fast. The great news is, once you’re up and running, it is much faster. Dolly Drive is awesome!

What if I lose the connection or move my laptop during my first backup?

If you accidentally disconnect, it’s likely that you will get some error messages but the good news is that your backup will pick-up from exactly where it left off without issue. To avoid the error messages, press the Stop Backup button in Time Machine. When you  are back to an internet connection, just press Backup now again. Dolly Drive and Time Machine will pick up from precisely where it left off. It may take a few minutes to get started with the resumed backup, but it will happen.

Make a clone backup.

If you have an external hard drive, we recommend that you first use Dolly Drive’s Clone Feature to create a bootable clone on the local external drive. Cloning is a critical first step in protecting your digital life.

The Clone: Your entire system duplicated & ready in an instant.

Dolly’s Clone Button makes an exact replica of your files, your operating system, your applications – everything – for extra safety, insurance and convenience! If your hard drive ever goes down, you just reboot in an instant directly from the external clone. With a clone, you never miss a beat, even if your entire computer crashes.

Watch: How to make a clone backup

Cloning creates an exact duplicate of your machine

Why you should clone before you cloud?

Cloning locally is much quicker than uploading data to the cloud. By cloning first, you get extra assurance that once you start your initial cloud backup, your data is already backed up locally. If your internal drive crashes, you can restart right away.

Doing your first Clone:

Just press the New Clone button and Dolly Drive will format the external hard drive and duplicate your OS, applications and personal content.

Subsequent clones:

To incrementally backup your clone, just click Update Clone. It only adds the files that were changed since your last update so it’s super fast.

Scheduling your backups manually.

Dolly Drive and Time Machine are both designed to do the backup process automatically so you don’t have to worry about it. However you can manually control your backups.

To easily gain manual control over your backups, use either Time Machine’s On/Off button or Dolly Drive’s On/Off Button, located in the same area.  To temporarily stop your backups, or control when your backups occur, just switch to Off. Do remember to press Backup Now with some regularity to manually back up yourself or switch back to On when you’re ready to go back to auto archiving so you don’t miss valuable backups.

Restoring files

To restore a file, just enter Time Machine through either Dolly Drive, the Time Machine icon or the arrowed-circle in your menu bar.

Once you’ve entered the Time Machine interface, use the arrows, spotlight, or the timeline on the right to travel through the “time windows” to find the exact version of the file, folder or application you want and click on it. Then click the restore button on the bottom right. The item will reappear on your current desktop, ready to go, as though it never left!

Watch: How to restore a file using Time Machine

If you are restoring an earlier version of a file in which a current version is still on your drive, Time Machine will ask if you want to keep both or just use the restored one. The choice is yours!

Customer Support – the best!

We guarantee that you will never have better dedicated customer support for Dolly Drive and Time Machine than you do with the Dolly Drive team. We can’t control upload speeds, internet connections or the occasional accidentally pressed button. But we promise that you will never be alone when it comes to Dolly Drive or Time Machine. We will walk you through or hop on a screen share to get you working whenever you need.

To see what users have to say about working with Dolly support, check out Tweets & Shouts.

Remember! Try our Dolly-on-one set-up service and a support pro will walk you through your installation and configuration for free. Just another way we make backing up to the cloud easy to do!

Visit our Customer Support Knowledge Base to see if some of your questions have already been answered. It’s a live section that focuses on some of the more common questions about Dolly Drive.  That said, you can always send us a note at support@dollydrive.com.