Maxtor One-Touch II, are they worth the investment

[PineRidge]

My tape back-up has become unstable and stalls in the middle of a back-up job. This has made a replacement solution necessary. Does anyone here have experience with the Maxtor external drive back-up? I understand they are much quicker to use than a tape drive unit and have faster seek times.

Can 3 separate machines, all running XP be backed up via network to a single Maxtor (providing the Maxtor capacity is large enough to support all 3 hard drives)

This one touch back-up solution sounds interesting.

 

[CTyler]

I don't have experiance with that drive per se but with NAS devices. Since we have a home network we went with a NAS devices. NAS is Network attatched storage. This way you plug it into your router, switch or hub and then map a drive from your machines. XP includes backup software with the OS and will back up to a network drive.

I'm running everything at 100 full on the network. A USB device would have more BW at up to 480mbps but you'll have to do a couple things. 1) Move it to the different machines A, B, C etc.. 2) Leave it connected to machine A and map drives from B and C, however you'll have to leave machine A running. Neither option is a big deal.

If you plan to use the drive like a NAS device you may be limited to single user access with the USB connection. This may not be a big deal for you. Just some things to think about.

There are user and editor reviews that you can read at places like PC Magazine, ZDnet, CNet etc...

 

[Wiens]

PineRidge,

That is our setup for our small business. We have three computers that are backed up to the Maxtor. We also have an older Iomega Peerless drive that immediately backs up any data files that are changed. No problems in two years.

Kevin

 

[PineRidge]

Kevin are you using the Dantz software that was provided with the drive or something additional to cover the network?

 

[rswyan]

Mike,

I don't have experience with the Maxtor external drive backup unit specifically but I do have lots of experience with backing up to external removable hard drives (using Firewire 400 - Firewire 800 is even faster) with Dantz Retrospect.

Retrospect is available as both a standalone version (single computer) and a server/client version. I own the latter with, I think, 5 or10 client licenses.

I have a VXA tape drive which is pretty fast as tape drives go that I used to use - but it is relegated to gathering dust since I have started to use hard drives for backup. Backing up to a hard drive is probably at least 10x faster than to (my) tape and seek times are basically instantaneous.

I have an external Firewire case that I built that uses removable drive carriers ($20 each.) The removable drive carriers allow me to swap out backup drives easily - so I can backup to more than one hard drive on a rotating basis (in case something goes wrong during a backup - that way you don't trash out your only backup)

Dunno what the Maxtor costs but you can build something like this relatively cheaply - it's just an external case, Firewire bridge board, Firewire PCI board for your computer if it doesn't already have one, removable drive carriers, a IDE hard drive or drives, and the backup software.

As far as backing up multiple XP machines goes, I'm sure that it could be done using Dantz Retrospect and several Retrospect "clients" - it looks like the "Small Business Edition" of the One-Touch II includes the approprate software (the other versions of the One Touch II appear to only have the software for a single computer)

I would definitely consider using Firewire as opposed to USB.

FWIW.

 

[fishman]

I was under the impression that USB2 was a little faster than a firewire port.

 

[slowzuki]

Firewire is faster than USB2.0 during continuous transfer. USB2.0 has a burst xfer a bit faster.

I have a One-touch 160 gb drive and I image my machine on a regular basis. I don't use the included software but it works fine with the silver keeper software I use. I use the rest of the drive for storage use (I partitioned it)

Never did setup the button. The drive is handy as the one I have is USB and Firewire, great to move files.

The firewire is extra special for us mac users as I can instantly boot from it instead of my regular hard drive if anything goes wrong.

 

[BobReeves]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( I was under the impression that USB2 was a little faster than a firewire port. )</font>

It is.. Firewire is on the way out USB2 is taking over. The good part about USB is it's backward compatible and all computers already have a USB port.

 

[ejtaylor822]

Hey Mike,
I am using the Maxtor II external USB drive and the Dantz Retrospect software to backup my "main" PC. I do not backup my other PC's "over the network" per se. What I do is share out drives from my main PC to the other PCs on the network. If one of the other PC's dies, I just rebuild it and remount the data drives. From my "main" PC I backup everything to the Maxtor external.

I have had this in place since October (I think) of last year with no problems. I love it! The software is fairly easy to use - they use different terms than I am use too but the concepts are still the same. I use an automated script to run each day to do an “incremental backup set” – I do not do an image copy only because I want to be able to recover changed files from the previous day. I could not find a way to make an image copy then perform incremental backup changes – it was all or nothing. One thing to note – I have tested restoring individual files and directories but have yet to perform a full system “bare metal” restore. However, I have no doubt it can pull it off based on what I have done with it.

Couple of notes:
1. I installed the Dantz installation CD in a special folder on the external drive. That way if the PC dies, or, I need to recover files to another PC, I can just attach the USB drives and load the software from external drive (portability).
2. The backup set catalog is kept on the external drive – same reason as number 1 above. If I need to recover files to a restored system or another machine the catalog is already there – just saves a rebuild step. The default is to keep the catalog in “My documents”.
3. The retrospect software just copies data to a drive then a backup set (so it can be used with DVDs, CDs, Tapes, etc.) and can be used on multiple PCs. I have not tested this, but, I do not see why you could not install the SW on each of your PC’s then share out the Maxtor II drive(s) from the local PC where the Maxtor is attached. This way you could then backup to a mapped drive using retrospect that would go to the external Maxtor II.

Just my thoughts and experiences.

Hope this helps.

Eddie

 

[California]

Is anyone else using Cristie PC-BaX?

It's commercial-quality backup software, free for personal use. I like it.