Seagate launches social storage drive

Seagate has launched a new line of external hard drives – the first to be able to backup photos stored on your social networks.

Its Backup Plus drives, launched on Tuesday, have the usual backup functionality of saving copies of your files from local drives, but signing into your Facebook or Flickr account, using the accompanying software, also allows automatic downloads of photos from those services.

You can also upload photos to Flickr and Facebook, as well as videos to YouTube, using this Seagate Dashboard software.

I found this worked well on both a PC and on a Mac – photos downloaded to a folder called My Online Documents and were placed in directories according to the Facebook albums. Seagate told me they planned to introduce sharing and downloads for other online services in the future.

However, I found the regular back-up software included in the Dashboard to be so simple it was confusing. Messaging was minimal – I could not monitor the progress of a backup, with only a message saying “Initial job pending” appearing. The drive light did not flash and I was not sure whether anything was happening or not.

Different backup plans I set up were also given virtually the same name, which I couldn’t edit, so this made it hard to choose the right one.

However, the 1Tb drive worked fine for regular drag-and-drop of files in Explorer windows. The drive comes in four colours and has an interchangeable interface – mine came with a USB 3.0 one, but others such as Thunderbolt can be swapped in and out.

The Backup Plus drives are the first update in the largest “refresh” in Seagate’s history of its consumer and business drives, the company told me.

Seagate also announced the acquisition of the French hard-drive maker LaCie last month, but sees its line as complementary to existing offerings. “They have a premium, specialty line, with designer and rugged products, which we think is a very good fit with the Seagate mainstream products,” Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing, told me.

“The intent we have is to maintain the LaCie brand for the time being.

The BackUp Plus portable drives are available from Amazon, BestBuy and other retailers immediately  in 500Gb, 750Gb and 1Tb sizes at suggested prices of $120, $130 and $140 respectively. Larger desk drives offer up to 4Tb for $250. International availability should follow shortly.