Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)An exercise in frustration. Recommended mostly for people who do not want to know what their computer is doing, or who do not even take any basic care regarding data security. Great for a family member or a friend who never backs up, but calls you when things go wrong.
The Seagate 500GB Replica drive tries hard to bring the ease of backup that Apple has provided with their Timeport software/hardware combo to the Windows based computers. In other words backup of your computer should be handled pretty much without user intervention until you need help with a crash, or want to recover a file that you accidentally deleted. The Replica promises to do this, for multiple computers, by keeping not only the entire drive backed up (Within limitation of the 500GB total capacity, the files do not appear to be compressed), but also as many different versions of changed files as will fit on the drive. When the drive fills up, the oldest of multiple files are deleted first. Restoring individual files is handled thru integration with Windows Explorer. A right mouse click will now show a Seagate Replica icon, which will allow you to browse the backup drive and selective restore as many versions of the file in questions as were backed up.
Restoring the entire drive entails booting your crashed computer with a supplied recovery disk by using the computer's bios "boot from cd rom function". This disk contains enough software to allow the dead computer to communicate with the Replica Drive and to restore it. Periodically Seagate recommends that you check their website for a new Iso image of the recovery disk.
OK, that's the background and it is supposed to work. Here is my personal experience:
Out of the box you get a shiny dark silver small (about 6x4x3/4") drive with a machined Seagate spiral Logo. It looks very classy. There is only one connector, a mini USB (solo cable and a docking cable are included). Upon plugging the drive in, it is detected as a USB mass storage device. This drive contains about 150mb worth of backup software. At this point you CAN use it as a conventional extyernal drive.
Installing the backup software took only a few minutes, afterwards a box pops up to let you know that "Seagate Replica is protecting your computer" The instructions say that initially this can take up to several hours.
So I left the computer on, with the nice blue ligh on the drive flashing for overnight. I have about 100 gig woth of stuff with photos, music, spreadsheets, and word files.
Next morning I fully expected the 100,000 files to have been fully backed up. But no, apparently the Replica only cataloged my drive. When I cliced on its icon in the tray, that is when it actually started to back up the drive. A few hours later it was down to only 80,000 files left.
Seagate warns you that the computer might get sluggish with the backup drive working and they tell you to turn off any Antivirus software as it may double the backup time. I did this, but web browsing was still slow, and I wound up temporarily right click safe disconnecting the drive.
When in use the Replica runs four processes for over 75mb of memory used. When disconnected this drops to 3 processes and about 20mb ram used. When done with the web I reconnected the Replica, and went away for about 12 hours. When I came back there was still about 10,000 files to go. I came back another couple of hours later and we were down to 800 files. Wow, I actually wanted to see it go to zero, kind of like mesmerized watching of the defrag software doing its stuff.
Well it never got down to zero! It jumped up to 1800! It would do this continuously, get down to about 500-1000, then jump up to about 2000. Apparently enough system files get changed and Replica wants to catch EVERY single change. You have absolutely NO control of how often, or which files to monitor for change.
Consequently if you leave the Replica plugged in all the time, your computer will be constantly running sluggish (your antivirus may be off from previous directions which is bad as well) and the little Replica will be busily clicking and whirring away. Possibly accelerating the hard drive crash that you were trying to protect against in the first place.
This is a major problem. The software needs to allow the user some control, even if it is thru a expert only mode. Until then I will only use it as a conventional backup drive. The software does allow you to reset the drive and delete all of the data if you want to free up the space.
Finally, it does allow you to backup all of the family computers in one place, but you have to install the bloatware software on every machine. If you don't, the new computer can stop the software installation at a "browse only" point. This allows you to see all of the backed up files stored on the Replica so far, and get access to only a couple as needed. I cannot confirm this, as each time when I tried this, I only got to see the file structure briefly, then the host computer would lock up and require rebooting.
The instructions say that if you do back up several computers, files which are common to more than one machine will only be backed up once. That is an advantage, since at least many system files are common, as may be any multimedia.
So to summarize: Replica is large capacity USB powered backup drive for multiple computers. The hardware works well. The software lacks crucial controls to allow user control of how often and which files to backup. My version after an online update is dated 4/10/09 VER 3.0768.5345. Without this control the drive runs constantly. I will not be using the mulicomputer capability untill this software is fixed. The memory footprint is ridiculously large. The browse feature from other computers is buggy. Until the software is fixed I will only use it in the conventional external drive mode. On my dual core XP SP3 computer having the Replica continuously run in the background makes every application feel slow. Fortunately all the problems should be fixable thru a software update, now we just have to wait for it.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Seagate Replica 500 GB Complete Multi-PC Backup System with Dock ST905004BDA101-RK (Silver)
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