Seagate FA Replica 500 GB Complete Multi-PC Backup System with Dock ST905004BDA101-RK

5 comments

1. 

   Jane Doe on November 12, 2009 at 8:06 pm

   This product seems to do exactly as described, and was extremely easy to set up. It’s so self-supporting that I don’t notice it’s running. I feel more at ease knowing my system is always backed up. Of course, you don’t really know how well a back-up system works until your computer crashes!

2. 

   Andrew Kalush on November 12, 2009 at 9:31 pm

   The product came to me as listed and very prompt. I have it running and it seems to do what it is advertized to do. But I have not used it to check out its backup & restore capability.
   
   Andy

3. 

   Steve on November 12, 2009 at 9:59 pm

   I bought this a month ago because I had 2 computers and a laptop with windows with no backup cd for two of them. I was really nervous about one of the computer because it is a refurbished unit I bought from circuit city (with extended warranty… ha!). Price was right but no windows disks. Well I plugged Replica in and it did it’s thing fast on all 3 of my machines. Then I put it back in it’s box and forgot about it until today. When the refurb machine wouldn’t boot to windows anymore (no safe modes either). I got a really quick blue screen of death and continual reboots. So I removed the hard drive got my latest data off it, replaced it and used Replica. You stick in the Replica boot disk and it handles it overwriting the disk with an image from last month. Took about 3hr for 250 gig. Rebooted and it worked great!

4. 

   Michael F. Daggett on November 12, 2009 at 10:46 pm

   Plugged it in and my hard drive was backed up by the end of the day, and continues to update as needed. No software to install, nothing to do. I love this product.

5. 

   Julia Rietmulder-Stone on November 13, 2009 at 12:58 am

   I got the Seagate Replica to use with the Windows Vista Boot Camp partition of my MacBook. I’m using the Time Machine/Time Capsule combo for my Mac files, and found the idea of a similar setup for the other half of the computer very appealing.

   Setting up the Replica was *almost* very easy — but mine (the multi-computer version) came with the dock, and I spent a good five to seven minutes trying to get the thing onto the dock. Couldn’t do it. Enlisted help. The help couldn’t do it. It *just* *wouldn’t* *fit*. The connectors aren’t complicated, there was no trick I was missing, it just didn’t work as it was supposed to, and it was too simple for there to be anything to fix. So I used the included (very short) mini-USB to USB cable and put the dock back in the box. (As a side note, the dock requires two USB ports, presumably for power, but without the dock it apparently only requires one. I *never* want to give up any more USB slots than absolutely necessary.)

   So anyway, after I gave up on dock, setting it up was very easy. I plugged it in. It prompted me to register, which I did. It started creating a recovery point and backing up my files. Since this is my secondary partition, I’ve only got about 25GB stored on it. The initial backup took about two hours, which seemed reasonable.

   When it was done backing up (which I knew only from hovering my mouse over the icon in the system tray), I started deleting stuff just for the sake of recovering it. It worked just fine, although it took me a minute to realize that although the main pane of the Replica Explorer is *not* Windows Explorer, the sidebar shortcuts *are* the real Windows Explorer shortcuts. So using those took me to the original folders, rather than to their clones on the Replica. The only way to navigate to something on the Replica is to do it “from scratch”, but from within Windows Explorer right-clicking on a file or folder will let you access it through the Replica.

   Other reviewers have talked about configuration options they’d like to see, and I don’t disagree. But here’s what really gets me:

   -Connect via USB only. Even if you’re using it with multiple computers, it’ll have to be moved from computer to computer. That possibility never occurred to me. I just assumed it could be plugged into one PC and others could do their back ups over the network. Nope.

   -Can’t be used as removable storage. Seagate says you can, but what they mean is that you can copy the files the Replica has automatically backed up onto another computer. It can’t be used for casual file transfers, no matter how much free space you have left on it.

   -Too “black box”. I worry that the trouble I had with the dock is emblematic of the kind of trouble that could be had with the device itelf — if something goes wrong and it doesn’t work, there’s very little the end user will be able to do about it since the drive can’t be accessed except using Seagate’s software. It makes me nervous to entrust my backups to something whose workings I know so little about. At least with the Time Capsule, if Time Machine loses track of what’s going on (as it has when I’ve replaced a hard drive), all the files are still accessible. Not sure that would be the case with the Replica.

   Long story short, I might give this to my grandmother. It would be better than her current backup plan — non-existent — but I wouldn’t worry that something truly critical would be lost if it failed.

   If you’re worried about preventing the loss of something truly critical and don’t mind being tethered, buy a 500GB USB drive for half the price of this thing, and invest in some robust back up software. Or spend two and a half times more, and get one of those HP MediaSmart Servers, which’ll do it all over the network and includes a lot more functionality.