Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive
Company: Seagate
Price: 500GB is $119.99; see web site for other sizes and prices. Prices vary among online retailers.
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or higher, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP3, USB 3.0 or 2.0 port
Seagate has long been a fixture in the world of internal and external hard drives. Recently, Seagate released a new type of drive—one that helps you share and save your digital media on social networks.
Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive is what you’d expect when thinking hard drive: it comes in various storage capacities and colors, and works with both Macs and Windows. The difference is the Backup Plus’ Dashboard, which users set up to upload pictures and videos to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, or download pictures from Facebook and Flickr.
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GoFlex Slim Performance USB Drive
Seagate
$100 for 320GB
It’s not the least expensive or the highest capacity external hard drive, but it is the slimmest, and it does have good performance on both Mac and Windows computers. You need to reformat GoFlex Slim using an idiosyncratic NTFS method specified by Seagate to achieve optimum Mac/PC compatibility. MyMac recommends you do this immediately after purchase.
A perusal of the Wikipedia entry for FireWire reveals it to be Apple’s brand name for the IEEE 1394 interface, initiated by Apple themselves as a serial bus interface standard for isochronous real-time data transfer, intended to replace SCSI for connecting data devices while also supporting audio and video applications.
However, in certain sectors of the tech enthusiast community, particularly those driven by either love or loathing of Apple and its mercurial leader, FireWire is used as a call to arms, a rallying cry to petition the world against the perceived injustices of a cruel and fickle master towards his loyal followers. Ever since the new laptop line shipped, there has been an ongoing mournful wail of protest at the cheaper, consumer-orientated Aluminum MacBooks with their twin USB ports but the traditional FireWire port deleted. How will we connect fast hard drives? How will we access Target Disk Mode for recovery purposes? How will we offload video from our DV Cameras? How will we survive with the sky falling in on us?????
Well, I am not going to rationalize why Apple visited this apparently appalling curse on us all. Limited case space? Shortage of interface chips? Mafia protection racket? A Federal conspiracy by the USB alliance? Frankly, I don’t give a fig why, how or wherefore, I just don’t care. And the fact is that most buyers of MacBooks don’t care either.
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Take Control of Easy Backups in Leopard
Company: TidBits TakeControl Ebooks
Price: $10.00
83 pages
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/
Joe Kissell is at it again; this time with an ebook entitled “Take Control of Easy Backups in Leopard” designed to make the practice of backing up your Mac an easy-to-do experience. The three most important points that I see that he brings to the table are: Continue reading »
• Use Time Machine or another backup program to store archives
of your files
• Create a bootable duplicate of your startup volume and update it
regularly.
• Keep at least one backup copy of your important data
somewhere safely away from your computer.
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