Seagate’s Backup Plus Drives Land In Australia


Seagate’s cloud-compatible Backup Plus drives were launched in the US a few weeks ago and now they’ve finally landed in Australia. But what’s a cloud-compatible backup disk and how much will it cost here? More importantly, do the local products carry a price premium?

Essentially, the Backup Plus suite of drives ranges from a 500GB disk up to a 4TB disk and allows you to schedule backups of your most precious data to the Seagate cloud. Best of all, it does it automatically, making it great for you to get for your parents or grandparents.

The 2.5-inch portable drives come in blue, silver, black and red, with RRPs starting at $139 for the 500GB and $189 for 1TB. The larger 3.5-inch drives meanwhile start at $179 for 1TB and range up to $199 for 2TB, $299 for 3TB and 449 for 4TB.

If you compare that to the international prices announced a few weeks ago, it’s a bit of a disappointment, especially for the 4TB drive which in the US will only set you back $US250. Even if you factor in shipping and sales tax, you’re paying that little bit extra if you buy it in Australia.

On a brief side note, at the launch of the devices in Australia this week, Seagate showed off how the software that is bundled in with the drive can save all the photos from your Facebook page for example, and that’s a great feature. Seagate said that so often photos don’t even touch a desktop or laptop before they’re uploaded to social sites, thanks to the rise in mobile technology, and I’d say that’s bang on the money.

The issue, though, is when you download all of the imagery from your Facebook profile, it gets thrown into a folder on the backup drive that is labelled with your full name isn’t protected by a password by default.

That means that if anyone gets hold of your drive and starts poking about, they might be able to see all the photos on your Facebook that you had kept private between you and a few other people for a very good reason.

Seagate assured me at the time, though, that password protecting social networking backups is something they it is looking into.

Image: Seagate


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.