Backing up can become a headache if you have hard drives in the order of 300GB or larger installed in your system. A good external hard drive that plugs in using USB 2.0 or FireWire is the perfect solution for storing backups, and Seagate's External 750GB Pushbutton Backup is one such drive.
It's 698GB formatted capacity makes it capable of backing up large single drives or even RAID 0 arrays and its performance isn't too shabby either. It took just over three hours to back up over 24500 files (185GB of data) from the 250GB Western Digital drive in our test bed using the FireWire connection and the supplied BounceBack software.
Once installed, BounceBack can work in conjunction with the "one-touch" button on the case to automatically initiate backups. Once your drive is archived, the directories and files can be viewed in their hierarchies on the external drive (in the same structure as their original location). Within BounceBack, file restoration is simple. You can choose to restore to either the original location or to a new one.
Testing with a smaller data set (4GB), data transferred from our test PC to the external drive, using FireWire, at a rate of 22.50MBps, while data from the external drive transferred back to the PC at rate of 28.98MBps. Comparatively, copying data on a drive connected to a SATA port can achieve rates around 20MBps. The USB 2.0 connection was slightly faster than FireWire, at least for copying data from the PC to the external drive.
Physically the drive has a sturdy plastic case, which is ventilated, and is stackable. If you're looking for a simple one-touch backup system with enough space to store all your files and more, this'll do you proud.