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.
This is great! (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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Re:This is great! (Score:5, Funny)
Is it as popular as Bennett Haselton?
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You know, there probably are a non-trivial number of people who think "that Bennett Haselton, he's a pretty insightful guy, I'm glad I know him."
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Is three is a non-trivial number? That's you, him & his mom.
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Can it hear what I am typing?
Well, never mind because I, for one, welcome our new Amazon overlords!
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If a tree types in the forest, and the keyboard falls, does it make an Echo?
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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
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I'm feeding recorded lectures to my Xfinity remote, just to keep it busy, lol.
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Extranal retentive?
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Re: This is great! (Score:2)
Yes, you should get one too. And then you will have two. Echo 1 will Echo 2. Your very own Echo crew.
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the catch. The backup is only good for 1 year. Beyond that you'll have to shell out the same amount that could have bought you a brand new 1TB HDD (or 2TB possibly when the year has elapsed and prices have dropped). It's a rip-off.
You'd be better off just buying two drives for $50 each and mirroring them. Then your backup won't just disappear after a year and nobody will try to squeeze annual fees out of you.
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Uhh, yes, it can be. I use several safe back up drives and have done so for years.
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My storage nirvana (Score:2)
Good question. All my data easily fits in a 64GB or 128GB SD card. Plus, as the owner of an Office 365, I have 5 licenses entitled to 1TB of storage each in OneDrive. Works like a charm
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All your drives are scanned for free. The subscription service allows you to request a restore.
Hard drive or software? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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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.
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Did it go up in flames?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Where did I say I didn't, you fat cunt?
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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.
Re:Hard drive or software? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
Re: Hard drive or software? (Score:3)
Go Open Source, with a Friend or Relative (Score:2, Informative)
Or go open source and sync your files over to a friend / relative's home: https://syncthing.net [syncthing.net]
That's wonderful (Score:2)
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They don't waste time with encryption. Their drives are designed to fail within 90 days. That's the real security feature right there.
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With typical up-stream home internet speeds, the thing won't even be done its butt sync before then.
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Everything! (Score:4, Insightful)
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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)
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?
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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
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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)
"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.
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it could be neither... what if amazon also used seagate drives to store the 'cloud' data?
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I'd venture a guess that Amazon has actually figured out how to reliably store data.
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They are just the middleman. The NSA stores the data.
They keep it nice and safe.
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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)
Given my experience with Seagate drives (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
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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.
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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
Ad? Ad! (Score:1)
So, this is just an ad. How is this news?
Swap files (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's what your level 3 web browser cache is for! ;)
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If you have to ask, it's too late.
hmm...I wish it were headless (Score:1)
Pod Bay Door 2.0 (Score:1)
"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."
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Trump: "Lie, that's not whip-cream!"
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Nude cross-dressing would be a frustrating fetish.
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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.
Automatic data INsecurity (Score:2)
'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!
NSA (Score:1)
Backup to NSA
Define "unlimited". (Score:2)
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?
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I'd expect one either pays for the space used at whatever the going rate was when the year elapsed, or whatever rate was locked in when one entered this agreement, or one chooses to lose data exceeding the amount of space one is willing to pay for. This seems quite straightforward to me and fair.
But what is neither straightforward nor fair is what one always has to look out for -- impossible "unlimited" storage promises because they're always a lie. There isn't unlimited storage available. So it's always a
Backup or mirror? (Score:2)
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)
Wd passport wireless pro is the real deal. (Score:1)
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!
marketing failure (Score:1)
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.
Binary buying (Score:2)
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
Third-Party Services (Score:2)
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
A More Accurate Headline (Score:2)
"Seagate introduces external hard drive that automatically sends all your data to Amazon."