Product Reviews

As users have become more aware of the importance of securing their data, personal backup devices have become more sophisticated. For backup to be effective, it must be simple to achieve, and Maxtor's Personal Storage 5000XT takes the one-button backup concept to its logical conclusion, as it truly offers a solution that can be activated with a single press of a button.

The package comprises a massive 250GB external hard disk encased in sleek plastic chassis offering a pair of high-speed FireWire ports and a USB 2 port. A couple of LEDs at the front show power and disk activity, while the all-important backup button is located to the left. Installation is simply a case of powering the drive up, connecting it to a host system and installing the drivers, which on a Windows XP system took a matter of minutes. The 5000XT functions as a standard disk drive and can be used as a removable, high-capacity storage device. However, the Maxtor has another trick up its sleeve in the form of the bundled Retrospect Express 5.6 software, which only supports removable media, turning the drive into a one-stop backup solution.

Along with a wide range of backup

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and restore tools, Retrospect offers a script generator for automating backups. Maxtor has utilised this capability, as it provides a custom script that's activated when you press the button on the drive. The One-Touch script is installed along with Retrospect, and initial configuration is carried out by pressing the button when Retrospect is first loaded. You can choose a source and destination drive, but note that, although you can include OS and application files, you can't select individual files or folders from the source drive.

To start a backup, simply press the button, which fires up Retrospect, runs the script and then closes it down. Your first backup will copy all files on the source hard disk, but afterwards only those that have been added or changed will be secured. All files are copied in native format, so you can view the contents of the backup folder and copy files using Windows Explorer. The One-Touch feature will only copy an entire hard disk, but as the backup software is a full version you can create other backup jobs and use the scheduler to automate them.

During testing, the Maxtor package performed faultlessly, although be advised against using a USB 1.1 connection, as copying 1.2GB of data took 32 minutes, while an initial One-Touch backup of 1.8GB of data took 47 minutes. Moving the drive over to a USB 2 controller card saw these times drop to under four minutes and six minutes respectively.

The Personal Storage 5000XT is one of the simplest and most cost-effective personal backup solutions we've seen. True, you still have to press the button for the One-Touch feature to work, but along with high levels of storage you get a fine software utility that offers a wide choice of backup options.