Clickfree Automatic Backup

By Neal Weinberg, Network World
November 10, 2008 12:01 AM ET

Cool Yule Rating: 4

Price: $119.99.

Description: If Q ever decided to create a 160GB hard drive for James Bond disguised as a cool looking cigarette holder, it would resemble the Clickfree Automatic Backup. It's sleek. It's silver. It can fit in your shirt pocket. And it works. Clickfree promises to backup everything on your internal hard drive without requiring a single click on your part. And that’s exactly what happens. You connect via USB, the Clickfree's blue lights start flashing and the backup begins. In my testing, the speed was nothing to write home about – it took about 20 minutes to back up 4,754 files containing 3.3MB. But the Clickfree backed up documents, photos, spreadsheets, jpegs, video clips, bookmarks, you name it. And everything is categorized for easy retrieval. Clickfree is great if you want to make sure your data is safe in case your computer is stolen or damaged. It's also useful in a variety of other situations, such as when you upgrade and want to move all your data from one machine to the other. One caveat: Clickfree would have gotten five stars, but it doesn't work on Macs.