You can also share your pictures and videos with friends over the Internet by emailing them a link that opens in their browser. Lyve lets you turn the Backup Plus into a personal cloud drive, so you can access your documents on the drive from your laptop, phone, or tablet (Android, iOS, Kindle, Mac, or Windows) via the Lyve app. Seagate also includes a free 2-year subscription to 200GB of cloud storage on Microsoft's OneDrive service, and the Seagate Lyve app. The included setup program also installs Seagate Dashboard, a utility that helps you back up your data, and share your pictures and videos on social media, as well as save pictures and video from your social media accounts. If you don't want to add another driver, you can reformat the drive for HFS+ to use it with your Mac exclusively. If you're a Mac user, you will have to install the included NTFS driver onto your OS X device in order to use the Backup Plus, but this only takes a few minutes. USM has since become obsolete.įormatted for NTFS out of the box, the drive will work right away with any Windows PC. The 2012 version of the Seagate Backup Plus has a proprietary USM connector for Seagate's Thunderbolt adapter. There is a micro-USB 3.0 port on the side for the included USB 3.0 cable. The base of the drive lacks rubber feet, so it has a tendency to slide off of a non-flat surface. The logo is also echoed in the bottom-panel molding. It has a black-satin finish on its top lid, along with a disk-activity light and Seagate's new swirly logo. That means that for general backups and storage purposes, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive is our Editors' Choice for portable external hard drives.ĭesign and Features The drive is a basic box that measures 0.8 by 3.1 by 4.5 inches (HWD), and weighs about 8.6 ounces. It has the same capacity as the Seagate Backup Plus Fast ($450.00 at Amazon), a top pick in the category, but at almost half the cost per gigabyte. The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive ($149.99 for 4TB) has the capacity to store hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pictures and videos, as well as files from your laptop or desktop. Even a 128GB phone will fill up with files eventually, and for many, those files are photos and videos that can't be easily replaced.

As time goes by, it seems like we always need more storage.

Seagate ntfs driver for mac review