Digital Trends

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB January 3rd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We’ve sampled the OneTouch 4 Mini previously, which uses the same software package as its big brother. It was still interesting to take it out for a spin the second time, and we came away with some new observations.

First we setup our backup routine, which was quite simple. Maxtor gives you the option of a simple backup that copies your “personal folder” to the drive, but we opted for a custom backup instead. We just checked the folders we wanted to backup and then set it to backup every night at 3:00AM. Every morning we examined our backup folder and sure enough all the files we had added to our backup source were on the OneTouch. Our only grip about the “simple” backup is that it excludes the standard locations for Outlook and Outlook Express mail, which is a hidden directory burrowed deep within Windows.

Next we tried to test the Sync utility, but found that it is not able to sync folders between XP and Vista, which is the same problem we had with the OneTouch 4 Mini. This is a ridiculous situation that we hope Maxtor rectifies at some point in the future.

The OneTouch 4 can’t sync folders between XP and Vista, which is silly.

We then turned to the SafetyDrill software, which we tested in the previous evaluation. It’s a fantastic program that provides for full recovery in the case of drive failure. It saves an image of your entire drive to the OneTouch, and if your drive fails, you can restore everything from the image on the drive. It’s a much more preferable than what you’d have to go through if you only had your data. In that scenario you’d have to re-install your OS, re-install all your programs, and even then all you’d have from the previous drive is just data. Having an image of your entire drive makes for a seamless transition from old drive to new drive, and we wished more backup drives had software that allows for full system recovery.

Finally, we checked out the encryption utility, and it works as promised. You just drag and drop files and folders into the program, and then drag them out of the little box to decrypt them. It’s a fine program but we have one gripe, and that is that it’s very inconvenient to have to move the files out of the encryption program to see them. We wish Maxtor would make the program work more like TrueCrypt (link: http://www.truecrypt.org/) where you open the encrypted folder as a volume that acts like a hard drive so you can see and use the files without having to decrypt each one of them.

The encryption tool is easy to use since it’s drag-and-drop, but we don’t like having to decrypt a file to look at it.

Conclusion

The OneTouch 4 has more features than any other backup drive we’ve tested, and we’d be hard pressed to decide between it and the WD MyBook. We like how the MyBook does backups instantly, rather than on a schedule, but the MyBook does not provide for a full system recovery, nor does it offer file encryption. The OneTouch certainly has it beat when it comes to features, however we don’t like how the OneTouch doesn’t save your email by default, and how it can’t sync files between XP and Vista though. Though the OneTouch offers more features than the MyBook, these flaws drag it down one notch below the MyBook in our opinion. It’s worth pointing out that the basic MyBook has just USB though, and the OneTouch 4 Plus has both FireWire and USB, plus works on Macs in addition to your standard PC.

Pros:

• Simple operation
• Tons of features
• Allows total system recovery
• Works with Macs

Cons:

• Have to manually save mail
• Can’t sync between XP and Vista
• Encryption is difficult to use