Clickfree C2 Automatic backup
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
For this review I looked at the 250GB model. The C2 comes in high gloss black, with capacity ranging from 250GB to 2TB. It’s not an imposing unit, although it’s quite eye-catching dues to the shiny black case. It maintains its sleek lines by having no power supply, no buttons and no connectors of any sort save a USB cable inset flush in into the back.
The only other features are the oblong blue light on the top of the unit, above the ‘clickfree’ lettering.
This inset was quite hard to dislodge on the test unit and this freaked me out a bit, I must admit. I don’t like applying too much force to devices. Also, if you worry about hard drives not being kept flat, it’s almost impossible to keep the drive flat once plugged in due to the shortness of the cable.
Above — turning the drive upside down reveals the cable
Once connected, the blue slot-light flickers attractively, and you get a dialogue saying ‘Initialising …’ and then another saying it’s initialised for PC, would you like to initialise it for Mac?
But of course... press the button that says ‘Make my device work on Mac (format HFS)’ (left), and say yes to the warning that it will erase all data (it’s new, so there isn’t any – but you will not need to do this again), and a few seconds later you have an auto backup drive for Mac OS X. I still had to launch the clickfree software (conveniently aliased to my desktop), OK to the End User License Agreement and the clickfree software boots as it did for the other two devices.
It searches for the selected files (the same 1GB’s worth as in the other two tests) and gets to work. Seven minutes 49 seconds later, the backup is complete – times that by 200GBs and you’re talking a 25 hour backup if my maths is correct; I would hope that’s not the case! (The restore took 6 minutes.)
Actually, it's not that bad at all, leading me to surmise a lot of the time is taken up by cataloguing regardless of how big the backup is, as I ran the full backup too and it only took a couple of minutes over an hour. That was for 58730 files including images, videos, music, office docs and more, adding up to just under 27GBs. That's impressive.
Like the Traveller, this volume mounts on the desktop (as ‘Clickfree_Storage’) and exhibits the same bizarre folder structure.
A bit like Apple’s Time Machine, if you think you can just open it, find your files and copy them back, think again – it’s possible but not easy (wuth TM, anyway). The best way to do it is via the dedicated software and click Restore.
Under Options>More Tools, by the way, you get the option to password-protect the hard drive, which will be attractive to some.
As with the Traveller flash-based backup, pressing Close in the software unmounts the volume – wait till it disappears off your desktop before you unplug it (a few seconds) and you’re good to go. Literally.
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Network-able
Another model is for networks – the Clickfree C2N can back up multiple computers across a home or office LAN. The C2N has all of the functionality of the Clickfree C2, and also includes Clickfree's new BackupLink – you can leave the C2N connected to any computer on the network and it locates and backs up all machines – both Windows and Mac computers at the same time.
The C2N is also in high gloss black, and has capacities ranging from 500GB to 2TB, priced from $259.
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From cradle to backupActually, the C2 isn't quite as featureless as I initially made out – it ships with a little black cradle that the C2 stands in. There are plugs on the base of the C2, if you imagine standing it on it's tail so the Clickfree banding is right way up (left).
This in turn plugs into a USB. It's purpose is that you can leave the cradle plugged in, whack the drive into it whenever you want a backup and voila.
(I actually missed this cradle completely as it's not mentioned in the Quickstart Guide – it was only when I was packing the C2 back into the box that I found it.)
'Automatic'
The trouble with ‘automatic’ things is that pretty quickly, you start wishing you had more control. It’s the same with Time Machine, for which I ended up installing a utility that just did backups at 7pm every night instead of every hour through the work day.
The thing with this Clickfree setup is that whenever a session finished and you click ‘Close’, the drive unmounts, so you have to unplug it then plug it in again – for example, if you want to restore some files, fine, do so – but then it’s finished and you can’t do anything like another up-to-date backup without pressing close, unplugging it then plugging it in again.
It’s a minor point, I guess – you can actually also mount it using Disk Utility if it's still plugged in.
What’s great — again, it works as advertised. The unit is small and not unattractive.
What’s not — the Clickfree software did not autoload when I plugged this in – it did on the other two devices. I had to boot it myself.
Needs — someone who has the time to plug it in for much more major, time consuming backups than with the other two devices recently reviewed.
8.5/10
What — Clickfree C2 250GB, $169 (models with higher capacities have higher prices).
System — Macintosh® OS X 10.5 or later with intel processor (and Windows XP, Vista and 7)
Available from — Noel Leeming.
Contact — Clickfree NZ
