Seagate Claims to be Easiest PC Backup Yet
Seagate Replica purportedly works like Apple's Time Machine
Backing up your data is one of the most important and sensible things that you can do for your computer system.
Most computer users – even savvy ones – don’t perform regular backups due to sheer laziness (I’m one of them). While companies have been selling “one-touch” backup solutions with USB hard drives for a while, the process of backing up still isn’t simple or complete enough.
Seagate believes that it has a USB external HDD that’s simple and complete enough to be the backup solution that all lazy Windows users have been waiting for. The Seagate Replica, announced today, promises that it “completely eliminates the need to manually learn, manage, or dedicate any time to the backup process.” In other words, it’s for the lazy.
The Replica is different from other backup solutions in that automatically and continuously stores and tracks all the changes in data on the main hard drive. This includes applications, e-mail, pictures, music, movies, internet bookmarks and the operating system itself with all the settings.
Boing Boing Gadgets has gone hands-on with this drive and reports that it works in a similar manner as Apple’s Time Machine function introduced in OS X Leopard: “Plugged in, its setup process was numbingly simple: agree to the TOS and you're about done. It then records a complete backup of your system and begins keeping track of changes you make. By cleverly journaling and organizing each sequential backup, the archive is unlikely to get substantially larger than the system it's attached to. As a result, you can dip into your machine's history, recover files, and restore the system in the event of disaster. It comes with a special boot CD to help in the event of the latter.”
Don’t expect all that to come cheap though, as the 500 GB model, which includes a dock, will retail for $199.99 and the 250 GB for $129.99. We’ve sent questions to Seagate on what happens if a system has more to backup than the capacities of the Replica – we’ll update the story once we get a response. Look for the Seagate Replica in May.

Of course...if it works as easily as they say...then it will be a good product for the lazy masses that probably include nearly all of us (me too) =D
And that will store incremental as well as total backups as compressed archives on the HD. (Kind of what Norton Ghost did, but without needing to have a 100GB backup for your 200GB disk where only 50GB is used.
Literally a system that does it all (automatically) when being connected to a pc via USB.
I use Acronis, and I've got about 100GB of data backed up to a 500GB eSATA drive. The ten backups (one full + 9 differential) take up about 200GB total (I used maximum compression). I have a Q6600 @ 3.3GHz, and 8GB RAM; it takes under 1 hour to back up the system and it will do it automatically. If the PC is off at the scheduled time, it pops up next login asking to run missed backups.
I've had to use the backups and restore, so glad I went out and got that 500GB drive. For backups, I would highly suggest an eSATA drive over USB / IEEE1394. I get a full 65-70MB/s on that whereas my Firewire drive can barely do 30-35, its even slower on USB. Get the eSATA, your backup won't take an hour. With USB, I bet it takes 2-3 hours. Backups are particularly intensive, as you need to go through each file, check if it exists and then check if its newer if a copy exists. eSATA greatly helps, more I/Os, more bandwidth.
I'd guess the former, but I really don't know
As for me, I have two layers of backups: a "normal" backup, performed daily by SyncBackSE (excellent program, btw) and a "Disk Image" backup also performed daily by ShadowProtect Desktop, a little known piece of software that is nonetheless PCMag's Editor's choice (over Acronis, Ghost, etc.)
I agree with "computabug". I wouldn't trust a seagate to back up my data. They would be the last ones to be trusted with precious digital information given their failure rates.