Given an Amazon review, indicate whether it is a 'Positive Review' or 'Negative Review'.

After suffering a catastrophic loss with my first One Touch, and a secondary but less critical failure of another, I finally did my homework and discovered Maxtor's simple solution was not a reliable solution, and that the truly reliable solution was not all that complex.<br /><br />I am writing this not only as a caution to others, but also as a suggestion on how to start a reliable approach to backup.<br /><br />THE PROBLEM: Despite my customer research, the Maxtor one Touch II and One Touch III are the worst product decisions I have made in some time - and there is a reason for this.<br /><br />Of the 2 Maxtor One Touch II's and one Maxtor One Touch III's only one of my II's continue to run. The first failure cost $3,000 to get the data recovered. Unfortunately I was also using it for data overflow at the time.<br /><br />The second (This model One Touch III) also died about a year after I purchased it. Fortunately I was using only for backup.<br /><br />They run great out-of-the-box, but after a year they wither and die. Why? I am not sure if it's the incremental file-backup software, or the hardware. Perhaps it is a combination of both, as Maxtor's incremental file-backup software progressively causes slower and slower operation, and more and more drive utilization.<br /><br />Google the words \"Maxtor repair\". There are many vendors. And with most, once they have your drive, it's usually the most expensive thing that needs to be repaired, typically requiring rebuilding the physical electronics.<br /><br />And considering the proprietary nature of Maxtor's drivers I don't find this price surprising.<br /><br />Final point: You cannot recover your system if you suffer a complete crash. Expect to reinstall Windows, Office, get updates, and enter licenses, etcetera. You can recover your files, yes, if your unit is still running.<br /><br />THE SOLUTION: Get a reliable high capacity internal or external bare bones hard drive, and use image backup software, not file backup software. There's a fundamental difference between \"file\" and \"image\" backups.<br /><br />I had several misconceptions about image backup software. But I discovered one can also recover individual files. And MORE importantly, you can recover your entire system as well - very simply from the backup drive. It runs faster, it does a form of incremental backup based on image changes, and is much more reliable. It is rare that a solution is both cheaper and better. And I was not looking for cheaper.<br /><br />For a hard drive I use a WD 1T Sata. And my software is ShadowProtect desktop. I am sure there are others.<br /><br />By the way, with this solution, you own the software, so it's not tied to some device that will fail. I also (once a month) do a one shot backup to my inexpensive Western Digital Passport. Again as I own the software, I can apply it to any number of different physical backup devices that do not carry the extra overhead cost of proprietary software and hardware.<br /><br />EXTRA: In addition, you might want to also consider iDrive, or Carbonite. I would use them for your documents only.<br /><br />SUMMARY: Unfortunately only those that have experienced the loss of work-related or financial data, family pictures, or even that report that your child wrote of which you are most proud, will appreciate the advantage of being prepared.<br /><br />Then to compound the problem, once we have experienced loss, we start out by looking for a simple solution. And we may be impressed with the concept of \"One Touch\".<br /><br />But after suffering a catastrophic loss with my first One Touch, and a secondary but less critical failure of another, I finally did my homework and discovered Maxtor's simple solution was not a reliable solution, and that the truly reliable solution was not all that complex.n \"file\" and \"image\" backups. I had several misconceptions about image backup software. But I discovered one can also recover individual files. And MORE importantly, you can recover your entire system as well - very simply from the backup drive. It runs faster, it does a form of incremental backup based on image changes, and is much more reliable. It is rare that a solution is both cheaper and better. And I was not looking for cheaper. For a hard drive I use a WD 1T Sata. And my software is ShadowProtect desktop. I am sure there are others. By the way, with this solution, you own the software, so it's not tied to some device that will fail. I also (once a month) do a one shot backup to my inexpensive Western Digital Passport. Again as I own the software, I can apply it to any number of different physical backup devices that do not carry the extra overhead cost of proprietary software and hardware. EXTRA: In addition, you might want to also consider iDrive, or Carbonite. I would use them for your documents only. SUMMARY: Unfortunately only those that have experienced the loss of work-related or financial data, family pictures, or even that report that your child wrote of which you are most proud, will appreciate the advantage of being prepared. Then to compound the problem, once we have experienced loss, we start out by looking for a simple solution. And we may be impressed with the concept of \"One Touch\". But after suffering a catastrophic loss with my first One Touch, and a secondary but less critical failure of another, I finally did my homework and discovered Maxtor's simple solution was not a reliable solution, and that the truly reliable solution was not all that complex.
Negative Review