These are the take-it-all-with-you days. For example, if you're going on a long business trip, you don't want to leave your videos home -- after a long day of meetings, you may need your copy of Iron Man.
The Seagate FreeAgent Go is one of a new family of portable hard drives that can alleviate that situation. It offers backup for its intended market of consumers -- and tries to make both the drive and the backup process as painless and even attractive as possible.
The current drive is an update of the FreeAgent Go that was introduced in 2007; while the previous drive had a capacity of 80GB, the current FreeAgent is available in three flavors: 250GB ($120), 320GB ($150), and 500GB ($200). Besides this impressive increase in capacity, the new version has had a fashion makeover: it now comes in blue, black, silver, and red, with a triangular pattern of lights that flash when the drive is connect.
The drive connects to your system via a single USB 2.0 connection. If you decide to kick in another $30 for the optional docking station, you'll need two USB connections -- apparently, the base plus the drive needs to pull more power.
In the initial backup, which scanned the My Documents and several other folders, I logged 1.3GB (5744 files) in about 105 minutes (using a somewhat old Sony VAIO VGN-S360 that held a 1.70GHz Intel Pentium M and 512MB of RAM -- as usual, your mileage may vary). Subsequent updates were, as expected, only a few minutes.
The backup software is simple, stable, and works nicely -- even the most technophobe consumers are unlikely to need to resort to any kind of documentation in order to work it. It also recovered nicely when, during an initial backup, I managed to accidentally disconnect the drive from a laptop.
This is not the drive to get if you want a really thorough backup -- it doesn't have the software (or the capacity) to ghost a reasonably substantial hard drive. But for a quick backup of documents and media files, and as a way to carry your data along with you, you could do a lot worse.
The Seagate FreeAgent Go is one of a new family of portable hard drives that can alleviate that situation. It offers backup for its intended market of consumers -- and tries to make both the drive and the backup process as painless and even attractive as possible.
The current drive is an update of the FreeAgent Go that was introduced in 2007; while the previous drive had a capacity of 80GB, the current FreeAgent is available in three flavors: 250GB ($120), 320GB ($150), and 500GB ($200). Besides this impressive increase in capacity, the new version has had a fashion makeover: it now comes in blue, black, silver, and red, with a triangular pattern of lights that flash when the drive is connect.
The drive connects to your system via a single USB 2.0 connection. If you decide to kick in another $30 for the optional docking station, you'll need two USB connections -- apparently, the base plus the drive needs to pull more power.
In the initial backup, which scanned the My Documents and several other folders, I logged 1.3GB (5744 files) in about 105 minutes (using a somewhat old Sony VAIO VGN-S360 that held a 1.70GHz Intel Pentium M and 512MB of RAM -- as usual, your mileage may vary). Subsequent updates were, as expected, only a few minutes.
The backup software is simple, stable, and works nicely -- even the most technophobe consumers are unlikely to need to resort to any kind of documentation in order to work it. It also recovered nicely when, during an initial backup, I managed to accidentally disconnect the drive from a laptop.
This is not the drive to get if you want a really thorough backup -- it doesn't have the software (or the capacity) to ghost a reasonably substantial hard drive. But for a quick backup of documents and media files, and as a way to carry your data along with you, you could do a lot worse.
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