The Hindu : `One button backup' for PC users

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 07, 2004

Business

Business

`One button backup' for PC users

By Anand Parthasarathy

ONE TOUCH: For the emerging "prosumer" market

BANGALORE, MARCH 6 .Worried about that unexpected disk disaster that can wipe out all your work? A storage device that can back up the entire contents of the hard disk drive in a PC or notebook computer — then update it every day within a few minutes — has been launched for the first time in the Indian market. Information storage specialists Maxtor, have unveiled the "One Touch" external hard drive, a tabletop item that looks like and weighs only a little more than an average hard cover book.

With the Maxtor "One Touch" connected to the computer — using either a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or a "Firewire" port — software bundled with the device can be programmed to copy the entire contents of the main hard drive, or selected parts such as "all pictures" or "all documents."

While creating a backup of an entire 80 gigabyte hard drive might take anything from 2 to 5 hours, the first time (at an average transfer speed of around 400 megabits a second) subsequent daily or weekly backups can be accomplished within seconds at the touch of a single button.

The system can also be controlled from the PC to directly download files from digital cameras and video handy-cams.

Maxtor's Australia-based Product Manager for External Storage (Asia Pacific), told The Hindu that this was the first such removable storage device introduced in the Indian market and was targeted at the emerging "prosumer" market — a mix of small and medium professional users such as graphic artists, photographers as well as lay consumers.

Photo studios here which were increasingly going "digital" would particularly benefit, since good quality photos can be as big as 30 - 50 MB and storing every day's output on the main PC hard drive will quickly exhaust the onboard storage. The "One Touch" is being launched here in different capacities from 80 GB to 300 GB at prices that range from Rs. 8,000 - Rs. 18,000.

There is a separate model for the Apple-Macintosh computer.

A New York Times survey last week signposts this newly emerging technology for the mass consumer PC market and reviews the early players: They include Maxtor as well as Western Digital and Seagate.

However, the other two companies while present in India, have not yet offered their "one button backup" products here.

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