External Storage: Terabyte Drives Compared

Seagate Manager

Seagate’s Manager is the tool to arrange backup, synchronization, encryption and make drive settings. Here you can select the idle time period until the drive switches off automatically, and enable or disable the LED feature.

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Simple Backup secures everything in your personal Windows folder. Custom Backup lets you select all the backup details.

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Backup

The FreeAgent XTreme offers two backup modes: Simple Backup create a daily backup of your personal files at 10 AM, while Custom Backup lets you select files and folders, as well as backup day/time and cycle mode. The synchronization feature is organized similarly, but there’s only one backup set, which the tool synchronizes with the files on your system.

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Encryption

Seagate didn’t forget to arm the drive with a bit of security, either. Once you set a password, you can drag and drop files you want to encrypt into the Seagate Manager window, which will automatically create a copy within an encrypted container file on the FreeAgent XTreme drive. However, we found no information on the encryption strength, and it isn’t possible to drag and drop files from within the Manager to another window to decrypt them. Instead, you have to use the decryption function and select files for decryption. We missed a feature that lets you work with encrypted files without having to do manual encryption and decryption. Tools such as TrueCrypt are more powerful than Seagate’s bundle.

Sync