Can?t imagine a life without your smartphone, laptop or the digital music player of whatever make, right? But just imagine the amount of data being generated?over two billion internet users in 2011 produced 294 billion emails, 69,120 hours of YouTube videos, 200 million tweets, 5 billion text messages, and so on. Also, a lot of personal data is stored on social networking sites these days. Moot point is, your digital life can be pretty chaotic if you lose this bit of data.
What if you are able to get backup for your precious data with a single click? Or, save and share the content on Facebook and Flickr? Well, technology can really make this happen. Hard drive maker Seagate has introduced an external portable drive that not only comes with software to backup content from your computer, it backs up content from social networks such as Facebook and Flickr. Nowadays, a large number of users have volumes of content held online on to such sites. Seagate?s new drive replaces the company?s previous GoFlex range.
For a layman, it is important to know that an external hard drive will give you a place to keep your data files, files that you create, word documents, photos etc. The portability factor is nice as you can take the external drive with you and plug it into a computer and all your files and photos are with you.
Our 1 TB review unit came to us neatly packed in a box. The Backup Plus also comes in 2 TB and 3 TB capacities. Out of the box, it becomes evident that the new Seagate Backup Plus comes from the same concept as the portable drives in the Seagate GoFlex family. It?s slightly thinner and longer, and comes in multiple colours, including silver, blue, red ,and black.
The drive comes in two parts: the hard drive and the adapter. The hard drive is a 2.5-inch SATA internal hard drive housed in a plastic chassis that has a small opening on one side to reveal the internal hard drive?s standard SATA female connector. The adapter part has a male SATA connector and a Mini-USB 3.0 port. These two parts can be snapped onto each other to form a portable hard drive.
I formatted the Seagate drive for use with my MacBook Pro and in my testing, the Seagate Backup Plus offered fast performance with USB 3.0. Let me state here that Seagate has truly simplified the process of formatting the drive for use on both Mac and PC. The drive comes with just one standard mini-USB 3.0 cable, which serves both as a data and power cable. Mac users can also increase transfer speed by upgrading to a FireWire or Thunderbolt adapter. But, this is sold separately and does not come with the Seagate Backup Plus package.
The Seagate Backup Plus comes loaded with the new hassle-free Seagate Dashboard software for one-click local backup. Once installed, this software offers some nifty ways to do backups. There are three main functions: Protect, Share, and Save. The Protect part is basically the local backup; here you can customise real-time local backups. The Share feature allows uploading of files to social networking like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The Save part does the opposite, enabling you to back up photos currently stored in your Facebook or Flickr account onto the drive.
In my trials, all the three functions?Protect, Share, and Save?worked well. They are very straightforward and simple to use. Additionally, the drive also comes with an online backup account that offers 4 GB of storage for free. What?s more, Seagate backs the Backup Plus with a two-year warranty. The company?s website contains driver downloads, installation help, and FAQs to help you troubleshoot your drive. This can be of immense help for home users as well as professionals.
Overall, the Seagate Backup Plus is a capable and compact portable hard drive that makes backing up your data simple, as it should be.
SPECS
Dimensions: 123.4 x 81.1 x 14.5 mm
Form factor: Portable
Capacity: 1 TB
Connectivity: USB 3.0
OS supported: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.6 and higher
Weight: 224 g
Estimated street price: Rs 7,700
