Review: Seagate Backup Plus Portable

A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. Unless you're a deep study, the differences between competing portable storage drives seem minute, and few things influence purchasing decisions more than capacity and price.

Warranty and brand loyalty are sometimes factors – we each have horror stories about dead hard drives, all of which end in a declaration along the lines of "I'll never buy a Whizzo-Disk USB drive again!" – but the fact is, most people just focus on how much it holds and how much it costs.

Hoping to change that thinking, manufacturers are introducing more consumer-friendly add-ons to their storage products. Take as an example the new Backup Plus line of drives from Seagate. They come pre-loaded with software that, in addition to automatically backing up your PC, also sucks down all the photos you've stored on Facebook and Flickr. They're versatile, too – a modular adapter system lets you swap in different interfaces to match your computer's connection type (though Seagate has offered this feature for a while).

Seagate's new Backup Plus drives are remarkably similar to the older Go Flex drives. You get a fast-performing, easy-to-use drive at a good price.The new "Backup Plus" name is also intended to increase retail shelf appeal. The company has rebranded its entire Go Flex line of consumer hard drives as Backup Plus, and the new drives are remarkably similar to the older Go Flex drives. You get a fast-performing, easy-to-use drive at a good price – the Backup Plus Portable line I tested comes in at $130 for the 1TB, $120 for the 750GB and $110 for the 500GB. The company also makes a larger Desktop drive that maxes out at 4TB capacity, and a razor-thin Slim drive that only comes in a 500GB size.

The Backup Plus Portable 1TB enclosure I tested measures about 3 by 5 inches and, like the GoFlex, is topped with a Universal Storage Module (USM) adapter. This is a connection technology based on the SATA standard that lets you snap a variety of interfaces onto the drive. My tester came with a USB 3.0 adapter attached. But if I upgrade to a machine with Thunderbolt, I can swap in Seagate's Thunderbolt USM module ($100), and just like that, my drive becomes a Thunderbolt drive. Likewise, if I need to use the drive within an existing FireWire workflow, there's a USM module with a FireWire 800 connection (price TBD). It's a nice feature that increases the drive's versatility, doesn't add too much bulk – it gains about half an inch to the length – and future-proofs the thing to a certain extent.

Something totally new is the Backup Plus' software utility that reaches up into the cloud and grabs your Facebook and Flickr photos. This happens by way of a desktop app that ships on the drive and runs on both Mac and Windows PCs. After connecting the drive and installing a few components, you're presented with a very simple dashboard. Click on the "Save" tool menu and you'll see two buttons – one with the Facebook logo and one with the Flickr logo. Click each one, log in using your credentials at each site, and the backups are initiated automatically. Both options worked, though the images from my Facebook account weren't the full-sized files, only the heavily compressed versions. Seagate says this is a limitation of the site's API.

File transfers go the other direction, too. Using the "Share" tool, any photos stored on the drive can be uploaded to Facebook or Flickr, and if you have videos on the Seagate, you can send them to YouTube.

Also in the dashboard is the "Protect" tool, which performs all the standard backup functions you'd expect, like copying your entire internal drive over to the USB drive, copying only specific folders, keeping continuous updates or setting time-based backups. You can also pause backups if you need to free up resources temporarily. However, the entire "Protect" toolset is only available to Windows users – Seagate's logic is that Macs already have Time Machine, and that's good enough. That seems fair, but only if you don't know what you're missing. The advanced backup options Seagate offers to Windows users are better than Time Machine's vanilla settings. To bring the level of control up to par, I'd recommend using a third-party app to tweak your Mac's default backup settings. Time Machine Editor is a trusted favorite of mine.

The Seagate comes formatted as an NTFS drive, so Mac users will either need to reformat it or install a utility that allows NTFS write access. Most will just reformat it, and the good news is that Seagate's software dashboard isn't sacrificed when you reformat it as HFS+.

And about that dashboard. These programs are usually terrible – I've deleted or skipped almost every one I've ever seen – but Seagate's is actually pretty decent. It's especially good for more timid computer users. Give them a super-simple dashboard like this one, and they'll literally have no excuses for not backing up their data. Of course, the argument only stands if they're using Windows.

WIRED Software makes it very easy to back up photos from Facebook and Flickr (Seagate says more services are on the way) with just a few clicks. Drive's modular connector lets you swap interface types. Build is light, but case is solid enough to be tossed into a backpack. Price is right. 2-year warranty!

TIRED Disparity in software features between Mac and Windows. Only a $20 difference between 500GB and 1TB, so there's no reason to buy the lower-capacity drives. Seagate's cloud storage service, which this drive can interact with, is pricey and seems unnecessary given the wealth of cloud-based options on the market.