Gizmo

Seagate External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Not so long ago, data backup technology was onerous to use and the process was painful and ugly.

Life is a lot saner these days when it comes to backup technology because hard drive makers are eager to please consumers. We started ignoring them when hard drives became commoditized, so they decided to get our attention again by innovating. If you're a hard drive maker, how do you do that? Well, you make life easier for your customers.

Seagate is one of those companies that fell out of focus — if you have one of their products inside your computer you probably don't know it. Now there is a reason to rediscover them because they have started to ship a comely external hard drive that offers a one button backup feature. And boy, oh, boy have they created a winner.

If you read this column regularly you know that I poked a stick at the Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive a while back, a direct competitor to the Seagate device, and bellyached that it was temperamental. The Seagate people, however, have done a much better job.

The 160 GB external hard drive comes in a black and silver box that sits pertly on your desk next to your computer. You connect with either a USB 2.0 or FireWire cable, both included, and then install a small program on your computer called Bounceback Express. It's a lean but smart little program that takes inventory of all the data on your computer and then backs it up to the Seagate hard drive. Once it's finished this it only backs up changed or new files the next time. It's clever, straightforward, and without fuss.

Maxtor's drive works with something called Retrospect Express, which is a separate software product adapted for use with it. The problem is that there's a whole lot of overhead and opportunity for confusion with the program's standalone features. Moreover, if the automated backup doesn't start correctly, then you get asked a lot of weird questions about source and destination drives and volumes and mounting and other headache-inducing lingo.

Like the Maxtor OneTouch, the Seagate has a one-touch backup button as well. And like the Maxtor, the software fails to recover gracefully when a computer crashes in the middle of a backup. It should recognize the problem and ask if the backup should continue after the system recovers, but it doesn't.

Still, I like the Seagate product better and if you need an external backup product, I highly recommend it.

Price: $225 U.S.
More info: www.seagate.com
Buy it: Amazon.com

-Andy Walker, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

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Copyright © Cyberwalker Media Inc. 2002