Seagate Backup Plus Slim series: your digital briefcase

Hyderabad: Mobile devices and phones account for the largest number of captured video and photos today.

Seven out of every 10 photos  are now snapped, using a  phone rather than a digicam,  finds a recent survey by analysts IDC, of global digital imaging practices.  

But we all know what happens to phones!  We tend to drop them or  lose them —placing at risk all those precious digital memories, unless we take pre-emptive action.

The name of the game is Backup. Thumbnail-sized “pen drives” are not an option; their capacity is limited to a 100 GB or so.

So it’s back to hard disk drives — and Seagate has gone as far as one can go in squeezing terabytes — that’s 1000s of gigabytes — into and incredibly small space.

They have just launched in India, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim series, the world’s thinnest external terabyte-scale hard disks and I got to try out the maximum capacity drive in this family, the 2 terabyte version.

Fitting easily in the palm of your hand and just over a centimetre in thickness, the metal-encased Backup Plus Slim weighs less than 160gm and will slide easily into your pocket or purse.

It comes preinstalled with Seagate Dashboard, the backup software that promises to protect, save and store your files.

Designed with a canny feel for what people do with Social Media, the software  has buttons that make it very easy to save from, or upload to, your page on Facebook, Flicker or YouTube, using your phone or tablet to connect. 

The drive comes with a  cable designed for the new (and much faster) USB 3.0 interface.

Typically, you would attach the drive to your phone using the micro USB port of your device.

You would need the free Seagate Mobile Backup app on an iOS or Android mobile device.

Also, if you need to carry your data with you for semi-professional reasons, maybe you should opt instead for Seagate’s Backup Plus Fast,  which will do the job at twice the speed.

It manages this by using, not one disk platter, but two, working back to back, thus halving the read or write time.

The price you pay is in diminished portability: the “Fast” drive is twice the weight at 307 grams and more than twice the thickness at 8.25 cms.

But for most of us thinner is better, with the compact form factor of the Slim drive.

The Backup Plus Slim is available in three sizes: 500GB Slim: Rs 4,250; 1TB Slim: Rs 6,000; 2TB Slim: Rs 10,500. The Backup Plus Fast is currently available in India in just one size: 4TB for Rs 25,000.

I also found these selling for a few thousand less online.