PC Mag Reviews Portable XHDs

Jen Trolio's "Handy External Hard Drives" article of August 24th compares the Western Digital Passport (3.5 out of 5 stars), the Seagate ST9160821U2-RK (4.5 out of 5 stars, and the Editors' Choice award, despite having a name no one could remember), and the Maxtor One-Touch III Mini (4 out of 5 stars). While you're over on the site, you can also check out the review of the ABS Plus from CMS, which got the Editors' Choice award back in May. There's also an external hard drive comparison chart to help you decide which drive is best for you.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-25-06: Seagate Surprise

Last Friday I got an unexpected response to the FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder. In fact, this response was not just unexpected: it was unprecedented. The message was from Jay Pecheck at Seagate.

“How are things going? I just read your blog as we always do here at Maxtor/Seagate and saw that you are going to upgrade to a larger external drive. I hope that you were not thinking about going out and getting one yourself!”

Well, yes, actually, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Frye’s had a good offer a couple of weeks ago.

Jay’s message continued:

“What are you looking for? Do you want a 1TB Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo edition with raid capabilities? Or maybe a 750Gb Seagate Pushbutton external storage solution? Or even going NAS with a 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II. Let me know!”

I was flabbergasted. Gobsmacked, as we used to say when I lived in England. I knew I had a subscriber from Maxtor—the autoresponder system says she signed up at the beginning of July 2005. But I’d never heard anything from her except the occasional “out of the office” automated replies. I’ve mentioned Maxtor and Seagate products and initiatives occasionally in the newsletter (as well as the merger which joined the two companies), but certainly had no expectations from them.

I said as much to Jay, who responded with:

“Well Sallie, you have covered our programs such as Backup Awareness month and for that we are grateful. But mostly because you preach what we preach…Backup your data! We feel that you have a great site and we want to help get the word out so…to the good stuff…I run the World wide reviews program for Maxtor and Seagate Branded Products and you have your choice of anything we make. Let me know what you want to look at and I will send it out.”

As it happens, I’ve been coveting a baby NAS drive since I first read about them. Given that there are a whole three computers in this household (two for me, one for my housemate), I don’t have a pressing need for such a device, and I would probably have bought a less extravagant hard drive. The Shared Storage II retails for over $700, and while my nearly-full 80 GB 2.5" external drive was no longer sufficient to back up my new 160 GB laptop, a 300 GB USB 2.0 drive would have done just fine.

Given a chance to get my hands on the NAS drive, though, I grabbed it. (NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage.”) A NAS drive connects not to your computer, but to your router. NAS on a consumer/small-business scale is fairly new, but companies with larger IT setups have been using $10,000 NAS devices for years.

Apart from having a drive that I could use for both computers at once, and that my housemate could also use, the real appeal of a network drive was for storing drive images of my old laptop. That machine, Astarte, has one measly USB 1.1 port and no FireWire, and making Ghost backups was always a painfully slow process. And while I no longer keep data on that machine, I still don’t want to have to go through reinstalling it from scratch if something goes wrong with the system. Even a 100 megabit ethernet connection is faster than USB 1.1. The Shared Storage II has gigabit network capacity, though my laptop doesn’t, and neither does our router.

Seagate shipped my new drive out Monday and it arrived on Tuesday afternoon. (I thought the water-soluble cornstarch packing peanuts were a nice touch.) I’d had time enough to figure out where to put it and to think of a name for it. “Teras” is Greek for “monster” and is the root from which we get “terabyte,” the size of the drive—a little obvious, but certainly appropriate.

Teras resembles nothing so much as a car battery. At four inches in thickness and six pounds in weight, it’s got about twice the heft of ordinary external drives and utterly dwarfs Bluelight, my 2.5" XHD. Like a car battery, its purpose is to be solid, reliable, and powerful, rather than beautiful.

The basic setup, which creates the drive’s public folders, is very simple: connect the network cable to the router and plug in the power supply, then install the software and reboot. Voila! A new machine appears under “My Network Places.”

I definitely recommend reading the user’s guide in detail before you start transferring massive quantities of data over to the drive, however. And going through the administrative interface to check things out, too. Since the box said “Automatic RAID 1 mirroring,” I assumed the drive defaulted to RAID 1 configuration, but I was wrong: it was set for “Spanning” instead of “Mirroring.” There are two drives inside that gray-and-black box, each with 500 GB of storage space. “Spanning” means they imitate one big drive. “Mirroring” (RAID 1 to the geeks out there) means that the second drive automatically and exactly duplicates the first, and if the first drive fails for some reason, the second will take over.

I’d already moved about 40 GB over to Teras before I realized that it wasn’t in mirror mode. That meant moving it off again before switching modes, which reformats and thus erases the disks. And if I ever decide that I want to switch back to spanning mode so I have more room, I’ll have to move all the data off and back again, and I’m not looking forward to trying that. (Of course, it will be years before I have to worry about it, since I’m not creating video or high-res poster-sized images like the artist friend who complained that Seagate should have given the drive to her instead.)

The other little hitch was in creating user accounts. In addition to the public share (in which the folders have names like “Our Software” and “Our Photos”), you can create separate private accounts on the drive. I’ve set up one for each of my computers and one for my housemate, but it took a couple of tries. This is because the user name the software suggests violates its own rules. When I went to set up a new user account, Maxtor EasyManage suggested “Sallie Goetsch” as a name. Logical, and probably pulled from Windows, as that’s my logon name. But spaces aren’t allowed in user names, as the manual told me when I went back to consult it in detail. Instead of refusing to create an account with an invalid name, EasyManage created an account and mounted it as my Z: drive—but wouldn’t let me put any data onto it.

Once I figured out the problem, deleted that account, and created a new one with an appropriate name, it worked fine. Except that I still see that supposedly-erased user name when I use EasyManage or Windows Explorer. And since switching to RAID 1, Teras shows up as both the Y: and the Z: drive on my other laptop. I’m thinking one might better call it Not-as-easy-as-it-looksManage. Of course, if I had RTFM (that stands for Read the F***ing Manual) ahead of time, I could have avoided most of that hassle.

I set up the EasyManage file backup on Astarte mostly to see how it works. It exactly duplicates the directory structure surrounding the folders you’re backing up, rather like an old freeware backup program I used to use (and now can’t remember the name of) before I latched onto Karen’s Replicator. That means that if you check “My Documents” as something you want backed up, it appears in the “My Backups” folder as “C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents.” That’s pretty limiting, and there are no filters to say, for instance, “Don’t back up X type of files.” Plus the schedule is limited to once per day, though you can go in and press the “Back up now” button at any time. On the plus side, it offers “Historical Versions”—you can save several different instances of the same file. Overall, I’d class it as “better than nothing, but nothing to write home about.”

The Ghost backup over the network using my Bart-PE CD worked a treat, though. I had to go through an extra step to map the network drive within the PE environment, but it was fast. In fact, I’m going to go make another one right now, because there’s a ton of software I forgot to install before making the last one.

The story will continue next week—by which time I expect to have things figured out a little better.

Wacky Thumb Drive Slide Show

ComputerWorld is offering a Wacky Thumb Drive slide show. I've mentioned some of these, like sushi drives, Tiki drives, and the Swiss Army Knife drives, before. The drives themselves range from the hilarious to the grotesque.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-18-06: And in Backup News...

Last week NBC San Diego ran a short piece called “Computer Backup Tricks Revealed.” The tricks aren’t new (though I don’t think I’ve talked about the Lojack laptop-protection system here), but it’s so rare for backups to make the headlines that it’s worth going over to watch the video (you must have javascript enabled).

Equally surprising is a piece in Tech Republic extolling the virtues of Windows XP’s built-in backup software. The author, Erik Eckel, claims that “Although many criticize Microsoft's native Backup tool for its lack of sophistication and flexibility, the Windows utility's lack of complexity is its greatest strength. Windows Backup provides a simple and proven method for safeguarding data. Further, it's a capable tool for backing up data to a medium that's easily stored offsite.”

The primary advantage, of course, is that if you own an XP machine, you already have this tool installed. Eckel provides 10 tips for effective use of the program, including “The Wizard Is Your Friend,” “Advanced Options Are Key,” and “You Needn’t Overcomplicate Schedules.” If you currently use, or are thinking of using, the XP backup tool, head on over to Tech Republic for all the details.

The other big backup news is Time Machine, the backup software built into the latest OSX release, currently known as Leopard. Sci Fi Tech calls Time Machine “the future of data backup.” Adam Frucci, author of the “Shift” column, explains: “What makes Time Machine so noteworthy is the fact that it backs up data automatically, and then allows people to recover it, piece by piece, very easily.” He goes on to add “With Time Machine, the only hassle is buying a second external hard drive to dedicate to backups — after all, you'll need enough space to store everything twice.”

Now, I’m a big fan of external drives, and looking to get a new, larger-capacity version for myself. And a good backup tool that ships with a system can only help. I do know that some people balk at the idea of buying an external drive (despite relatively low prices for high storage capacities), and that external drives are just as vulnerable to hardware failure as internal drives (though they usually suffer less wear and tear). And I’d like to wait and see how Time Machine stacks up against the other Mac backup options.

I’m not in any position to compare Time Machine to Windows Backup, because I don’t have a Mac, never mind a beta version of Leopard. If anyone out there can write a feature-by-feature comparison, I’ll be more than happy to publish it here.

If nothing else, though, Apple gets credit for giving their new product a great name.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-11-06: Survey Says...

There’s a poll on the home page of the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog (top of the right column) which asks “When was the last time you backed up your computer?” The possible answers are:

1. Within the last week
2. Within the last month
3. Within the last year
4. I’m supposed to back up my computer?

Of the 38 people who voted, 23, or 60.5%, say they’ve backed up within the last week. (They must be paying attention to the reminders.) Five, or 13.1%, answered “within the last month,” four (10.5%) within the last year, and six (15.7%) responded with “I’m supposed to back up my computer?”

Because the sample is so small, no statistician in the world would claim any kind of validity for those numbers. But a company called The Diffusion Group surveyed more than a thousand US households which have broadband internet and either already have or plan to get home networks and found that only 11.3% backed up every week, and the greatest number of respondents (37.8%) backed up only a couple of times per year. 16.4% never back up their data, and 6.6% don’t know how often (or whether) they back up.

Those are not encouraging figures, though they parallel other studies on the subject of backup. Most people don’t back up nearly often enough. The only good reason not to back up more than a couple of times of year would be that your data doesn’t change more than a couple of times a year, and it’s difficult to imagine a computer user who could claim that.

In fact, according to The Diffusion Group, the average home generated 322 GB of data in 2005, and they expect that number to grow to 1933 GB by 2010. This boggles my mind, since I don’t have 300 GB on all my hard drives and computers combined, but then, I’m not recording digital video and I don’t even take that many photographs. It’s actually not that hard to imagine creating that much data in a year, particularly for doting parents capturing everything their offspring do on the HandyCam.

Of those households that do back up, 88% use optical media (CDs or DVDs), 33% use external hard drives, 6% use an online backup service, and 17% back up over the network, either to a server or a Network Attached Storage device. (Yes, I know that adds up to more than 100%. Clearly some of the respondents make more than one kind of backup.)

This explosion in data generation leads TDG to conclude that “consumers will need a secure, non-PC-based platform on which to store the vast amounts of personal digital data created by these devices—a single storage platform that is networked and can share resources with both fixed and mobile PC and CE devices.” I have to say I find the new network-capable XHDs very attractive, and my brother is building a DIY NAS device to back up his photos of my niece and nephew.

Most existing options require some technical expertise on the part of the user, though not necessarily more than is needed to set up the home network in the first place. TDG sensibly emphasizes “storage equipment that is easy to use and fits into the normal cycle of daily PC and CE usage.” The most common reasons I’ve heard people give for not backing up are “It’s too complicated,” “It takes too much time,” and “I just forget,” so “easy” and “automated” are both important if the numbers of those who back up are going to improve.

Source: The Diffusion Group
Press Release
Analysis and Forecast
(The actual report costs $1495, so I haven’t read it.)

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-04-06: Versions of Backup

A couple of weeks ago, right before his mail & web server crashed, the Ur-Guru alerted me to a new backup and synchronization tool he’d discovered. (Yes, there was a backup server and no, none of the mail got lost.) The Ur-Guru, as I’ve explained before, has a pretty substantial network of computers and has always used custom batch scripts to handle most of the backups. While he likes Acronis True Image for creating individual drive images, storing complete images of all 60-some drives isn’t feasible. So he wrote his own backup scripts.

Then he discovered XellSoft’s SynchronEX.

“It kicks Karen's ass, I say,” was his first remark. (This is a reference to Karen’s Replicator, a handy freeware program which I use for my daily file backups. No offense intended to Karen herself.)

“Note the XVS in the features. That's what my custom scripts were designed to do, and what they do. No other sync/replicator tool does that, until this one, that is.”

What’s XVS? I couldn’t tell you what it stands for, but this is what it does: instead of just overwriting an older version of the file with the newer version, the XVS feature renames the older file and saves it so you can go back to it if you need to.

“I often find that I change something that later I want unchanged and once the changes overwrite a backup... they are lost. That's why my scripts keep ‘multiple back copies’ and that's what this XVS does, except this thing also does it in ZIP and ZIP paths while mine does not handle archives as targets.”

Versioning is particularly critical for those working with source code, but it can be handy for other things as well. Microsoft Word’s “Always create backup copy” command (under “Tools | Options | Save”) does this in a small way, but only for Word files.

XVS is optional, so you don’t have to save multiple copies of files, and you can choose which kinds of files to save versions of. There’s a wizard for setting it up, and while the interface isn’t completely intuitive and the documentation is written in a language tantalizingly similar to English, but it’s still pretty easy to set up.

I’m not yet sure that I’ll be replacing Karen’s Replicator, as I don’t really need versioning, but I’m going to keep SynchronEX on my system and continue to explore its possibilities.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, download a free trial. The pro version is $29.90—almost certainly worth it if you’re a pro and need the extra features.