Data backup, is one of those things that we know we should do, but it’s awfully easy to ignore.  Like the annual visit to the doctor, or a radiator service, we often put it off far longer than we should.  It’s not that there aren’t enough choices, but too often, none are particularly easy to implement.

I’ve had plenty of external hard drives previously.  My first was from Western Digital, and held a whopping 120 GB’s.  While I diligently loaded it up when I first purchased it, after not too long, it ended up in the bottom of a closet in a nest of USB cables and power bricks.  It was too simply overly cumbersome to ever see any regular use, made too much noise, and had no included software.  I’ve used USB powered hard drives before, which at least eliminates the power cable, but in years past they didn’t quite hold enough data compared to their fuller sized and speedier desktop cousins.  Based on notebook hard drives, they had limited capacities, and much slower speeds.  While a RAID array is ideal for hard drive backup, I don’t think most home users have the technical savvy to go that route, and my desktop doesn’t have the space for another hard drive.  While network attached storage (NAS) could have filled my needs, they tend to be expensive, and rather overkill for my needs of backing up a single desktop.
My desktop hard drive is 250 GB’s; still the Samsung I purchased years ago.  Its nearly silent operation, and brisk speeds keep it in my system, and it won’t be replaced till my next new build (likely next year).  I simply wanted something affordable, and easy to use that could backup my desktop hard drive.

I recently spotted a Western Digital My Passport Essential 250 GB USB powered hard drive at work.  Hmm.  It was nice and portable, and I wondered if something like that could do what I needed.  While it is a fine hard drive, when I looked into it, I couldn’t figure out if there was any software to do backup included.  My research figured out that while these USB hard drives are awfully similar in specs and price, there were two things they differed on: styling and software.  The other thing that became apparent is that Seagate clearly had the best software in this area.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go is available in 3 capacities: 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB (a 640 GB is coming out soon).  I purchased the 320 GB as it was only a little more than the intro model, and gave some extra room to grow.  After formatting, it holds 298 GB’s of data.  Benchmarking it with HDTune 2.55 shows me that the average read rate is 24.2 MB/s which is reasonably quick, but doesn’t hold a candle to most desktop drives these days.  It is available in a variety of colors (stealing a page from Apple’s Mini playbook from a few year’s back), and is quite compact, and could almost fit into a shirt pocket.  I’m also impressed with its thinness.  It runs very quietly, and if it weren’t for the lights that pulse with the data transfer, you might not know it was even doing anything.

The package includes just the drive, and a short, white USB cable.  The software comes loaded up on the drive.  It installed easily, and you tell it which folders on the desktop hard drive to stay in sync with.  Then, in the background, it simply monitors those folders, and stays in sync with them.  Simple concept, but very elegant in execution.  I used it both in Windows XP, and the newer Windows 7 (RC), and the Seagate FreeAgent Pro played nicely with both of them.  After an initial couple of hours of file transfers, it now just keeps it up to date with the changes on the desktop.

After years of being frustrated with the lack of available solutions, Seagate has hit the target squarely with their FreeAgent Go solution.  Finally, a drive I can just plug in, setup, and literally forget about, and have my desktop’s data all backed up, all the time.  I guess it took years for these compact hard drives to have large enough capacities, but now they can hold as much as most desktop drives from a few years ago.  If you just need basic backup, at an affordable price, this is a great way to go.

Jonas

Seagate