Seagate Replica portable backup drive

Backups may be boring, but an up-to-date copy of your laptop’s hard disk can be a real asset if something goes wrong with the original. Even if you’re not too bothered about losing your documents, it’s quicker to restore a system from a back-up than it is to reinstall Windows and all your applications — and that’s assuming you still have access to all the original install CDs.

The problem is that even with a cheap external hard drive, backup software still relies upon arcane terminology and you usually have to leave your PC alone when a back-up run is scheduled — no wonder most people don’t bother with them.

This where Seagate has spied an opportunity. The Seagate Replica drive is a back-up solution for people who want some security for their PC, but don’t want to get bogged down deciding whether ‘incremental’ or ‘differential’ best suits their needs.

The set-up is simple. Inside the box is a portable USB hard drive with a stylish silver plastic case with a rubberised underside. Plug it into your laptop, install the Replica application that pops up on the AutoPlay dialog box and that’s all there is to it — literally. The backup process is pre-configured and wholly automatic, and the only indication that something is going on is the pulsing blue light on top of the drive. Backups don’t get any easier than this.

If you want to know a little more abut what’s going on behind the scenes, then Seagate doesn’t make it easy — the workings of the Replica are kept deliberately obscure. When first connected, it makes a complete copy of your laptop’s hard drive, down to the very last file, but once this is complete, it only copies files that have changed. So, while the first backup can take some time, subsequent runs are much quicker and the process doesn’t interfere with anything you’re doing at the time.

In line with its ‘fire and forget’ operation, you only have a little control over what the Replica backs up and no control over when. The C: partition is backed-up by default and you can add other partitions, but you can’t exclude folders from the list. So, if you have 300GB of ripped DVDs lurking in your My Documents folder, you’ll need to move them to a different partition to keep the Seagate Replica from copying them.

We weren’t able to determine how the Replica decides when to backup files — we’re still waiting to hear from Seagate — but it doesn’t seem to use the same hourly schedule as the similar Time Machine tool in Mac OS Leopard. Instead, it appears to monitor the hard drive for changes, since there’s usually only a delay of a couple of minutes between a file being modified and a copy being made.

Making backups are only one part of any backup solution, of course, and restoring files is just as important. The Seagate Replica doesn’t just overwrite the backup of a file when it detects a new version, it creates a new copy and this means that you’ll end up with a version history of the files on your PC. Right-click a file in Windows Explorer and you can see each copy that’s available on the Replica, which is handy if you accidentally save over a file accidentally — a situation that many undelete programs struggle with. You can only open files and not restore them to their original location, but this is no doubt to prevent you inadvertently overwriting a file you want to keep with an older version of itself.

Recovering files from within Windows Explorer is only useful for documents — you can’t ‘open’ programs or .dll files, for example. For these, you’ll need to open the Replica Browser and this is simply an Explorer-like view on the Replica’s contents. This shows the same folder structure as the original partition and once you’ve found the version of file you want to restore (which can included deleted ones), you just drag it back to the appropriate place on your laptop hard drive.

File-by-file backups are useful for recovering from accidental deletions and overwrites, but the Replica also offers a complete partition recovery. Although we can’t think of any reason why you couldn’t boot from the Replica itself to initiate this, Seagate instead supplies a boot CD — so, not much use for netbooks most ultraportables, then. This runs a Linux environment in which you choose the backup to restore (there’s a version history, remember) and the whole restore process takes about the same time as Replica’s initial backup.

Although it has a few quirks that could catch out a novice, the Seagate Replica is a neat backup solution that’s hard to fault. Our only real complaint is about capacity.

Since you can’t exclude folders from the backup, the 250GB Single-PC Replica won’t maintain much backup history if it’s plugged into a laptop that’s chock-full of files — older backups are deleted once the Replica is full to make room for new ones. The 500GB Multi-PC Replica only costs a little more though, and while this adds support for backups for more than one computer, the extra capacity and bundled desktop dock (it allows the Replica to stand upright), it’s probably a better choice for single laptop users who want to save their files for longer.