Digital Trends

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160GB) September 27th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

As soon as we pulled the mini out of the box and attached it to our computer, we got a pop-up asking if we wanted to install the software. Once we had, we were presented with a plethora of options.

The first tab just shows you that your drive is connected, and lets you change settings such as what the “one touch” button does, lets you test the drive, change power settings (to set the drive to go idle after a specified time period), and to check for software updates.

The Maxtor Manager suite offers five tabs of security and backup options.

The second tab is labeled “Backup” and lets you create and edit a backup schedule. You can set it to backup certain folders at certain times, and it works wonderfully. We set it to backup our “documents” in the dead of night and it worked perfectly every time. You can also restore files, and we have a complaint here. Instead of letting you just restore files back to their original location, it just shows you the files you have backed up, so you have to manually copy them back to where they used to be.

You can schedule certain folders to be backed up on a schedule of your choosing.

The third tab is labeled Sync, and it lets you syncronize folders between different computers, such as your notebook and your desktop. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem since our desktop runs Vista and our notebook runs XP – you can’t sync folder between the two operating systems, which is a big problem in our opinion since a lot of power users are still running both operating systems.

The sync utility does not play nice with both Windows XP and Vista, unfortunately.

The fourth tab is named Safety, and it’s not a misnomer. It lets you create a backup image of your entire computer in case disaster strikes. We actually decided to test this to its full extent, and came away fully impressed. We have a notebook that we are looking to sell, so we didn’t care if it got hosed. We ran the Safety Drill utility, which makes a backup image of our hard drive. We then deleted the partition of the drive on the notebook. Next, we booted from the CD that comes with the drive, which is required for Safety Drill to work properly. Maxtor notes in bold text in the manual to NOT LOSE THIS disc, but it would be very much appreciated if an ISO of it was on the drive itself, in case one does lose the disc. Once we had booted to it, we selected our backup image from a list, and then after about fifteen minutes we rebooted, and our notebook was exactly as we had left it, with everything intact. This software works exactly as promised, and is perfect in our opinion.

We actually wiped our hard drive, and then restored it with the Safety Drill utility.