Storage firm Seagate announced the launch of its Backup Plus Fast hard drive line and the expansion of its Rescue data protection plan at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Rescue, which offers a comprehensive data protection plan on a range of storage options from multiple brands, is now available at Staples in the United States and with NCIX and Canada Computer in Canada, and is not only available from more retailers, but also covers hard drives and storage that may be included in a notebook or desktop computer system.
Staples launched the Seagate Rescue plan in 1,537 stores in the United States with the notebook and desktop computer market starting at $49.99 for a two-year plan, while the external drives offer starts at $29.99 for a two-year plan.
The data protection plan provides a service where in the event of a file or several files being damaged, lost or destroyed, the consumer now has a path to recovery of the data.
“Seagate has long been in the business of providing storage and security for the world’s data. We are now very pleased to continue the roll out of a data protection service plan for computing devices purchased at a number of retail channels throughout North America,” Scott Horn, vice president of global marketing at Seagate, said in a statement. “This is the third in a three-prong offering from Seagate. The company specializes in providing storage hardware, solutions and now services to the millions of consumers and companies that depend on us every day.”
The Backup Plus Fast drive features a USB 3.0 interface to deliver transfer speeds up to 220M bps and offers a whopping 4TB capacity. The drive is currently available through the company’s Website for $299.99.
The drive is configured as RAID 0, which stripes the data across both drives increasing the volume capacity and transfer speed.
The company’s Dashboard software provides one-click backup solution, but can also be set as a scheduled backup up as needed. Additionally, the Dashboard software will back up Facebook and Flickr albums to ensure that even video and photos shared through these networks are backed up and easy to find.
Users can employ the Save and Share features to download and upload content from these social network sites. Even all photos the user has been tagged in can be backed up from social networks to the drive.
The latest version of the Dashboard software includes an upgrade aimed at users with an increasingly mobile lifestyle–a mobile backup application to provide protection for digital data on mobile devices.
Users can install the free Mobile Backup app on an iOS or Android mobile device to back up all of the data from that device to a drive or a cloud service. Backups from mobile devices can also be sent directly to the drive over a WiFi connection while within the network, or utilize cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive while on the road.