Well know we should backup, but we hardly ever do. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself, honestly, but it can a pain in the ass to remember to do.
That’s why the $65 dollars you’d drop on this hard drive might just be the best $65 bucks you’ve ever spent.
The main knock we have against this hard drive is the absolutely silly name. Just try saying the name of it out loud – it’s the “WD My Passport Ultra Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive“. What the…!?
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We prefer something simple and Apple-like, like “Time Machine”. Or simply “Kickass Backup Drive of Awesomeness“. It would probably sell much better.
But name aside, this little bugger rocks. It comes in a small brick that’s easily portable. It’s available in 4 sharp colors: black, royal blue, maroon/red and silver (or “titanium”, they call it).
In testing, it worked great with both Windows and Mac OS X. The 1 terabyte model (TB) is plenty for anyone who isn’t a total uber-geek. A terabyte plenty of backup space for anyone, honestly. (But check with us again in 2 years and we’ll probably tell ya different…)
We recommend dividing up the hard drive up into smaller partitions. One should be as large as your main computers hard drive, that way you can simply clone the entire thing using something like Carbon Copy Cloner for OS X. (Check out DriveImageXML for Windows hard drive cloning.)
It’s not bigger than a breadbasket. It’s nice and light and fits right in the palm of your hand.
And it’s fast. It’ll transfer data quickly and you can access data quickly. The USB 3.0 is … well, nice. It’s good to have the current top of the line with the USB 2.0 backwards compatibility.
You don’t need a separate power cable, which totally rocks. It powers itself over the USB 3.0 cable. We hate having that big power brick, especially when traveling.
That, along with the compact size, makes it a really nice travel hard drive. Just toss it in a backpack or briefcase for a weekend or business trip.
This is all you need for portable backup. It’s really nice to be able to stash in a backpack.
It also has automatic cloud backup with WD’s own “WD SmartWare Pro” backup software. Again, WD is not great at naming stuff (we didn’t even know that Western Digital was calling itself “WD”) – but at least they’re good at making decent hardware and software.
You can even backup wirelessly to the cloud using Dropbox. Slick.
So if you’re looking for a great, cheap, portable and durable backup hard drive on Windows or Mac – here ya go. Easy peasy, Japanesey. Don’t look anywhere else. This is the one. BUY IT!
Or, you know, do your homework and look at some other ones too. But if you’re lazy, just get this one. 😉
