SanDisk Ultra Backup 32GB USB

I know a lot of Windows users that cringe when I mention Mac’s backup system called Time Machine. “We’ve had backup in Windows for way longer than Time Machine” is their typical response. I agree. What they fail to realize is the ease of use that Apple’s Time Machine brings for backing stuff up. Plug in a drive and you’ll be prompted to chose it as a Backup drive and that’s it. With Windows, you have to manually go into the Backup utility and set a job- something most people will never do. SanDisk thinks that it has an alternate solution for such people with their Ultra Backup USB drive.

I received the 32GB version of this USB drive that looks very much like any other USB drive but with a button on it labeled BACKUP. If you remember, I had briefly mentioned SanDisk’s U9 platform in our review of their Cruzer. The backup utility is a part of their U9 platform that allows you to easily backup your documents, pictures, music or anything else for that matter by simply pressing the Backup button on the USB stick. But first, here is how the USB drive performs as reported by SiSoft Sandra.

The 4182ops/minute for the SanDisk Ultra Backup is pretty close to the 4378ops/min that their Curuzer 32GB scored which was the second best performing drive in our USB drives round-up. That makes the Backup Ultra a reasonably fast drive to backup your data to. An unobtrusive icon in the System Tray with Status updates keeps you informed about the backup status. Here is what the backup Application looks like.

You can schedule automated backups as well as specify any particular folders you need backing up. Password protection isn’t offered in the Backup application, but you can protect the ENTIRE drive with a password using U9. Unfortunately, this only works under Windows at the moment. Restoring is as easy as clicking the restore tab, selecting the folder or file you want restored and hitting restore.

I cannot stress how important it is to have a backup- I once lost an entire collection of pics for one of our family vacations and had it not been for a CD backup up somewhere, I would’ve slept on the couch for a few nights. The SanDisk Ultra Backup is certainly a good concept and allows you to create backups for your important data in a much easier way that Windows does. The only issue is the 32GB capacity, which might be sufficient for some but over the years, your pictures, music and home video collection grows by leaps and bounds. A traditional hard drive with 250GB or 320GB of storage feels better suited for a backup.