Clickfree HD225 review

The Clickfree HD225 is a portable hard disk with built-in backup software that you simply plug in to your Mac to begin saving your files. This drive has a 250GB capacity, but others are available up to 500GB.

Setting up a backup regime is less of a pain than it used to be since Apple introduced Time Machine. However, Time Machine is only available for those of us who have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5. Users of older versions of Mac OS X must rely on more traditional back-up regimes. And even for Leopard users, having a second back-up routine provides greater security than backing up all your data to one drive.

As soon as you connect the Clickfree drive to your Mac, the software launches and begins to back it up. This, as the product's name suggests, all takes place with no interaction whatsoever between you and the Mac. It doesn't make a complete system backup of your drive, but rather it copies important file types and folders to its disk, such as Office documents, photos, music and emails. Once the backup is complete, the number, type and space used for each file is displayed, and you can search and browse saved files.

The Clickfree can back up as many as 15 different Macs, providing there's enough space on the disk to handle all of your files. The drive will automatically sort and store the data for each Mac. Sadly, though, you can't easily mix-and-match Windows and Mac backups. You can copy the files made on a Windows backup to your Mac and begin a new backup, but the plug-and-play nature of the Clickfree isn't available.

Our first backup took a little over 30 minutes for about 70MB of data and a few minutes to copy across additional files after a day's work. Usefully, the Clickfree can work away happily in the background, so you're not losing Mac time while the backup is running. In this sense, it would make a good offsite option for an office machine; back up your Mac at the end of the day and take the drive home with you.

To restore your files, you follow the three-step instructions that are available from the launch screen. However, all your files will be restored to a folder on the hard disk named Restored Files.

If you need to edit backup preferences, you simply plug in the drive and select options. This will cancel the automatic backup and take you to the management section of the software. Here, you can choose to exclude certain file types from the backup, update the device's software or reset the drive to its original state. There's not much in the way of user management, as you can only remove a user entirely, and see when the last backup took place and how much space that user's backup is using on the disk.

For the price, the Clickfree offers a fast and wonderfully simple method of backing up your documents and its fast, too. We'd have liked to manage side-by-side Windows and Mac backups, but this is a minor failing.