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.
