6. Backup Software

As I mentioned earlier, Maxtor provides software for both Windows and Apple systems. I've found that manufactures often provide Apple support as somewhat of an afterthought, but Maxtor's support was first class. The Mac OS flavor of the bundled "EasyManage" application shown in Figure 13 had the same set of capabilities as found under the Windows version.

Figure 13: Configuration Application

The application can be used to back up selected client folders to the SSII on scheduled days and times, or initiated manually. Figure 14 shows that backups can be incremental or full. An advanced option for backup allows the application to wake the computer from sleep, back it up, and then put it back to sleep. Nice.

Figure 14: Backup settings

The other main feature that can be set up from the "Settings" menu is what Maxtor calls "Drag and Sort". This capability is designed to automatically categorize files based on their file extension. For example, all ".jpg" files dragged onto the SSII network disk icon get automatically moved into the "My Photos" folder.

As far as I have seen, this is a unique capability and a quick test showed it worked as designed, but with some quirks. For example, Figure 15 shows a menu that allowed me to "Create a user account", but eventually I figured out that what it really did was create a new shared folder, not a User account. However, the term "Shared Folders" is properly used on the web interface main menu to refer to network shared folders.

Figure 15: EasyManage "User Account" creation