Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250 GB

If, like me, your computer now holds a significant amount of data about your private life and your family's life in the form documents, e-mails and photos, and music etc. and if, like me, you are increasingly irritated with feeding a constant stream of DVDs slowly into your computer in attempts to obtain backups and viable records of everything should the wheel come off, then the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini could be the solution for you. Basically it is a small 11cm x 7cm x1cm silver and black hard drive (slightly larger than a pack of cards)which is capable of storing all your documents at a touch of a button or on a schedule and as importantly , it has the capacity to recover all the contents of your hard drive should you have a complete computer disaster.
The One Touch Mini comes in three capacities, 160, 250 and 320 GB. Most users will find the 250GB capacity more than ample for average personal use.
All you do is connect the single USB and power cable into your computer,connect the other end to the Maxtor box, follow on screen instructions for about five minutes installation time, then press the button on the front of the Maxtor to back up your files. The back up of all my music, photos, documents etc took about 4 minutes. Usually this takes me forever when I run my Norton back up.
After this initial back up you can either remove the appliance or leave it plugged in (It powers itself from the computer) and back up according to a schedule you set for yourself.
As this is a portable system you can then move your files into an encrypted folder should you be concerned about then having all that data accessible to others.
After you save all your personal data you can then use the machine to save an image of your computer's entire internal drive. If a problem occurs you can then reboot and recover what you have saved. This saving process took a bit longer but only minutes not hours.
I was expecting this process of saving and backing up to be stressful and complicated. Usually just the instruction manuals to new hardware and software are enough to make my blood pressure rise but the only complicated part of this process was opening the plastic wrapper that contains the product. A great gizmo.