Maxtor OneTouch III

I purchased the Maxtor OneTouch III 500Gb hard disk, not because of Time Machine (I remain a user of the oh-so-2005 Tiger), but because of this post on TUAW, which had me scurrying off to System Profiler where I discovered that, yes, my first generation MacBook Pro did have a Segate drive with v7.01 firmware. Ho-hum.

First impressions of the OneTouch III (which, coincidentally, works just fine even if you haven't used the first two) were good. Skipping the glossy green box with its stock photo of an attractive young family creating the kind of happy digital memories you'd want to safeguard with regular backups, you get to the drive itself, which is probably best described as substantial. It's about the size and weight of a house brick -- despite having an external power supply -- and has a rubberised coating on its two largest faces which helps make holding it feel safer than if it were shiny plastic or aluminium.

Substantial is not, however, an adjective you could apply to the printed documentation, which runs to two pages each of installation instructions for both Mac and PC in about a dozen different languages. More in-depth documentation is provided on one of the three bundled CDs, the others holding Mac and Windows, and -- a latter addition -- Vista, drivers.

For a while now I have been trying to find a decent NAS backup device, the complicating factor being that I need to use it for both Mac and PCs. As the OneTouch is basically just an external hard disk, using it for both platforms proved a simpler affair. While it comes formatted as NTFS, it took only a few moments for Disk Utility to partition into two: HFS+ for the Mac and FAT32 for Windows. While OS X will see both partitions as separate drives, Windows will see only the Windows partition.

Installing the bundled software on both platforms was straight forward, as was configuring it, which was a simple matter of choosing which folders to backup, after which the initial backup is created. Here I ran into problems on the PC, with the backup failing to run, instead flicking back to the configuration screen with no error message. On a hunch I reformatted the FAT32 partition Disk Utility had created to NTFS (something I should have remembered to do anyway), after which backup ran without a hitch.

Actually, I should really mention something that had me stumped for a little while, mostly due to my failing to read the instructions and expecting things to be harder than they were. I spent a while on both computers, going through the set-up application looking for the "Backup Now" command. While it's in there, what I was missing was the eponymous OneTouch feature. A single press of the button on the front of the drive is all if takes to start a backup.

So what else is there to mention? The drive is both Firewire 400 and USB 2.0, and comes with nicely flexible cables for each. Backups are written straight into a folder on the drive, with no form of compression, which means that you can delve in at any time to recover your files.

The real test of backup is firstly, whether it is simple enough that you don't see it as a problem to backup regularly (which is apparently where Time Machine scores), and secondly how those backups perform in the unfortunate event that you need them. Only time will tell on these scores; all I can say is that so far I couldn't be happier with the OneTouch III.

The Maxtor OneTouch III 500Gb Firewire 400/USB 2.0 is available from amazon.co.uk for £113.98.