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Cloud Data Storage Networking The Internet Technology

Seagate Introduces External Hard Drive That Automatically Backs Up To Amazon's Cloud (theverge.com) 106

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Seagate and Amazon have partnered up on a $99 1TB external hard drive that automatically backs up everything stored on it to the cloud. The Seagate Duet drive's contents are cloned to Amazon Drive, so you can be pretty confident that your important stuff will be safe. Getting set up with the cloud backup process requires plugging in the drive, signing in with your Amazon account -- and that's pretty much it, from the sounds of it. Drag and drop files over, and you'll be able to access them from the web or Amazon's Drive app on smartphones and tablets. If you're new to the Drive service, Seagate claims you'll get a year of unlimited storage just for buying the hard drive, which normally costs $59.99 annually. Amazon's listing for the Duet (the only way to buy it right now) confirms as much, but there's some fine print: Offer is U.S.-only; Not valid for current Amazon Drive Unlimited Storage paid subscription customers; You've got to redeem the promo code within two months of buying the hard drive if you want the year's worth of unlimited cloud storage; If you return the Duet, Amazon says it will likely reduce your 12 months of unlimited Drive storage down to three, which beats taking it away altogether, I guess.
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Seagate Introduces External Hard Drive That Automatically Backs Up To Amazon's Cloud

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  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:42PM (#53396583) Homepage Journal
    This will go along nicely with my Amazon Echo, which is very popular. Everyone has one and they are very useful. You should get one too. Right now the Amazon Echo is on Sale at amazon.com. Get it now! You will be glad you did.
    • This will go along nicely with my Amazon Echo, which is very popular. Everyone has one and they are very useful. You should get one too. Right now the Amazon Echo is on Sale at amazon.com. Get it now! You will be glad you did.

      Someone bought me one as a present last Christmas. After a few weeks of frustration at the far-from perfect voice recognition and limited capabilities I just gave up on it. Now the only time it gets any use is when it gets confused and gets activated by the TV. Jeez I just realized the Amazon Cloud has been analyzing all my living-room conversations for the past year.That's frigging scary, I am gonna go unplug the damn thing right now

    • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      Everyone has one and they are very useful. You should get one too.

      Perhaps I'm a victim of Poe's Law, but that sentence is something I'd expect to hear from Trump; the second sentence directly contradicts the first. If everyone has one, nobody needs to get one.

      STUPID STUPID STUPID, Annoyingly stupid. And possibly spam.

      No, I do not have an Echo for the same reason I have no stores' "rewards cards"--I think being stalked by corporations is even creepier than being stalked by human beings,

      There's no way in he

  • by Enigma2175 ( 179646 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:48PM (#53396623) Homepage Journal

    This doesn't sound like they created a hard drive that automatically backs itself up, they created software that will sync your hard drive to Amazon. This is not new, difficult or news. Thanks for the slashvertisment though!

    • I agree it's nothing Earth-shattering but it sounds like a sensible idea, given that the last fucking Samsung drive I had died without any warning whatsoever.

      • Did it go up in flames?

      • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        Samsung? Did it catch fire and explode, or just stop working? Either way, you should back up your data, but I would NOT suggest the cloud. Just buy a second drive to back up the first.

        • Apart from actual working sysadmins, I'm going to guess that the majority of the smug bastards saying "you should have backed up" don't back up every single day.

          I didn't lose much, but it's still annoying.

          • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

            I don't back up daily, more like weekly, plus whenever I have a rash of new data. I keep the backup drive unplugged except when backing up, and never in s thunderstorm. Losing my non-backed up data would only hurt a little, it isn't like I'll lose a 10,000 customer database or anything.

            Before I retired, backups were automatically done daily by software. I had to change the backup tapes weekly.

    • This doesn't sound like they created a hard drive that automatically backs itself up, they created software that will sync your hard drive to Amazon. This is not new, difficult or news. Thanks for the slashvertisment though!

      You have to remember the audience this kind of product is designed for.

      That would be the voice-enabled-do-it-for-me-blink-to-order-plug-and-play-app-enabled generation who can't be bothered with any extra effort in order to back up their data. Hence the set-it-and-forget-it-for-dummies simplicity.

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @05:38PM (#53396991)

        It would also be useful for the idiot-in-IT-that-told-me-we-had-reliable-backups-but-never-bothered-to-test-them-and-is-now-telling-me-that-we-just-lost-six-months-of-data.

      • There will be extra effort for sure, you need to install the application, you need to log in with your amazon credentials (or make an account if you don't have one), probably select what you want to sync to amazon cloud, etc. They don't mention any new app developed by Amazon for this so I can only assume the existing (horrid) amazon drive windows software will be used. Also this is just cloud sync, not backup, if you overwrite a file by mistake (or some virus does it) it is good bye and thank you for all t

        • There will be extra effort for sure, you need to install the application, you need to log in with your amazon credentials (or make an account if you don't have one), probably select what you want to sync to amazon cloud, etc. They don't mention any new app developed by Amazon for this so I can only assume the existing (horrid) amazon drive windows software will be used. Also this is just cloud sync, not backup, if you overwrite a file by mistake (or some virus does it) it is good bye and thank you for all the fish.

          It really doesn't seem to be more than just giving you a freebie when buying some product, which isn't in any way new. Seagate portable drives and some Samsung phones come with something like 200GB OneDrive space.

          The average pleb doesn't quite understand the impact of syncing until all of their data everywhere is sitting in a nicely encrypted ransomware file.

          And this has nothing to do with a "freebie". This has everything to do with generating recurring revenue in an annual storage plan.

    • Seagate has built in software to do all this fancy stuff for Windows. Each Seagate I get, I simply reformat it using XFS instead and bye bye software.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Or go open source and sync your files over to a friend / relative's home: https://syncthing.net [syncthing.net]

  • I just hope that Seagate had the sense to implement encryption on their device and its backup storage.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They don't waste time with encryption. Their drives are designed to fail within 90 days. That's the real security feature right there.

      • by chrish ( 4714 )

        With typical up-stream home internet speeds, the thing won't even be done its butt sync before then.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:53PM (#53396639)
    Now I don't even have to get malware for this kind of service!
  • Everything! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DidgetMaster ( 2739009 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:54PM (#53396655) Homepage
    That means it will also back up your OS files, your programs, and everything else you download off the internet. After your first free year of cloud storage, you will be paying for every GB of stuff uploaded...including a lot of stuff you don't care if it is backed up or not. It's like when cable charges you extra every month for all those channels you never watch.
    • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      If you're dumb enough to put your OS , all your programs, and your browser cache on an external drive, then yes.

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)

    by deadwill69 ( 1683700 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:56PM (#53396675)

    But it's a Seagate. Of course you would want another copy of it somewhere else. I've seen nothing on the warranty so I guess the cloud is the warranty too?

    • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      Do you work for Maxtor or something? I've had hard drives for decades, few have failed and the failures weren't brand specific, and all were old when they died.

      Did you have it sitting next to a heater vent or something? Solid state electronics hate heat. I've had a 3TB Seagate for a couple of years now.

      I do avoid Sony like the plague, because if you buy digital electronics from someone who deliberately vandalized your PC with malware that came on a Sony-BMG music CD your daughter bought in a record store, y

      • I do wish Maxtor was still around. Had good results with them. Them and Seagate used to make my favorite drives. I have Seagate drives in some of my test/recovery machines that are 20 years old now. Mostly SCSI and they have worked flawlessly and continue to do so. Got some WD, mostly SCSI again, that have worked the same way. Hitachi, etc.

        Something happened along the way with SG and their crap went down like the Titanic. At least in their consumer line. Last time I used SG, i replaced the drives in t

  • Oxymoron (Score:4, Interesting)

    by I4ko ( 695382 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:56PM (#53396681)

    "drive's contents are cloned to Amazon Drive, so you can be pretty confident that your important stuff will be safe."

    It either does clone to Amazon or is safe, not both.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      it could be neither... what if amazon also used seagate drives to store the 'cloud' data?

    • by fisted ( 2295862 )

      I'd venture a guess that Amazon has actually figured out how to reliably store data.

    • That's not an oxymoron, though. An oxymoron is when apparent contradictory terms are in the same sentence, not actual contradictory terms

  • Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jwymanm ( 627857 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:56PM (#53396683) Homepage
    Just in time for 1tb caps everywhere.
  • by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:58PM (#53396699)

    This might actually make them reliable enough for normal use. (66% failure rate on 1tb drives over an 18 month period. I'll never buy another.)

    • I'll never buy another.

      If you took this approach then you should never buy another HDD again. Every major manufacturer has had a colossal lemon. My IBM Deskstar 40GB is the most reliable drive I've ever owned, I still power it up on occasion as a party trick just to show people that truly horrendous reliability is often highly dependent on the MODEL not the make.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Our org purchased a box of 8 external Seagate drives to distribute to various staff members. All 8 failed within about 2 years. I suspect there was a broken or defective manufacturing tool in place the day they were made.

      To be fair, that probably happens to every product every now and then, and our bad experience is not a statistically useful sample size.

      But on a gut level I now avoid Seagate. Assuming the published benchmarks and reliability surveys are reasonably accurate, my avoidance is probably not ra

  • by Anonymous Coward

    So, this is just an ad. How is this news?

  • Swap files (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @05:15PM (#53396821)
    I heard the cloud is fast and infinitely scalable so I'm looking forward to the awesome performance boost I should get by putting my swap on this.
  • I think this is neat in general. It's always good to backup your stuff, and for most people its too difficult to actually do that. I would love to see it as a NAS device instead of a drive though.
  • "Dave, this is your hard-drive. I captured video of you yanking off to cross-dressing nude midgets wrestling in whip-cream. Play $500 to the address found in folder "uscrewd", or the vid goes to Youtube. You got 3 hours to comply."

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Trump: "Lie, that's not whip-cream!"

    • by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      Nude cross-dressing would be a frustrating fetish.

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Jeez, stop injecting reason and logic into my jokes. What is this, slashdot or something? By the way, the participants could have long fluffy hair with bows, makeup, a bra, but nothing below, and that would still qualify as written to most people.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Buy the hardware, pay for the 'service', automatically expose your data to loss, snooping, and outright theft. What a great deal.

    'The Cloud' can go fuck itself.
    If I've got a 1TB (or bigger) external drive, why the actual FUCK do I need 'The (shitty) Cloud' for?
    MEMO TO COMPUTER INDUSTRY: Stop creating solutions for problems THAT DON'T EXIST!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Backup to NSA

  • Seagate claims you'll get a year of unlimited storage just for buying the hard drive

    When previous so-called "unlimited" storage systems came out they were canceled and the storage system provider (and their sycophants here on /.) tried to pretend that one could "abuse" said storage merely by uploading too much data. Since this flies in the face of unlimited storage, it's worth asking what exactly does "unlimited storage" mean here?

  • Does this do actual backups like Apple's time-machine?

    Or just another cloud service like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc etc. , bundled while a standard 1TB HDD?

    Because a mirror is quite useless if you want to recover an old version of a document, or those photos you accidentally deleted 3 months ago.
    You still need to do real backups.

    A shame Slashdot can't find a more interesting way to monetise the site.

  • Encryprtion key (Score:5, Interesting)

    by plazman30 ( 531348 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @06:44PM (#53397539) Homepage
    Do I get to pick my own encryption key, or can Amazon always see my stuff?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    The My Passport Wireless Pro has root ssh available out of the box. I installed rclone on it. That is a hdd that automatically backs up to cloud services!

  • They're backing up the backup.
    If you can't trust the nice new external drive, don't buy it,
    just backup to the cloud.
    Seems like a marketing failure.

  • Not as in 0s and 1s, but as in razors, if you buy Gillette, you have to buy specific blades, until you are tired of the razor. Or as in ink cartridges, especially HP, and Tassimmo drink capsules etc. etc. I've also been supplied with a TV remote that has a specific button for the cable supplier's 'store' so I can easily get more digital stuff.

    Of course, usually there's some kind of intellectual property lock that prevents others entering the supply market. I use non-HP in my printer but it complains that
  • I'm tired of appliances that have built-in support for connecting to third-party services that can't be removed. Recently I bought a Sony streaming player, and turns out that some time ago, due to a YouTube API change, it no longer connects to it, nobody's gonna fix it and I have an icon doing nothing that I can't remove. Same with my Nokia N9: Ovi Store, broken Skype application, Nokia Music Store. The original service provider is gone and now it's all polluting the applications list and there's no a way t

  • "Seagate introduces external hard drive that automatically sends all your data to Amazon."

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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