Seagate Emphasizes Backups in New Hard Drive Line Seagate, the hard drive maker, is redoing its consumer line-up with a new product that should make its mission crystal clear to shoppers. Named Backup Plus, the slim (14.5 millimeters) hard drive moves data from a computer for safe keeping. But it also will pull down photos from Facebook or Flickr too. The company says the device is pretty. True, and it comes in four colors: black, silver, red and blue. The company says it is easy to use. Also true. You are presented with a simple screen with three options - Backup, Share (for putting your data up on social networks) and Save (to pull that data back onto the drive.) You can drill down and make it more complex, but you don't need to. The company also says that set-up can be accomplished in two minutes. Well, the set-up isn't completely intuitive, but you won't go screaming back to the returns counter with the device. Once you've figured out how to start the process, it goes smoothly. The device does what it promises to do and does it well. It comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable, but also works with a Firewire and Thunderbolt adapter. One of the nicest features of the Seagate drives is what it calls the Universal Storage Module. It is a removable module on the connector end of the drive that can be replaced with a new one when the technology industry comes up with a new kind of connector. That extends the usefulness of the drive by a number of years. Although, by the time you'll need to do that, a 500-gigabyte drive will be cheaper than the connector, mark my words. Backup Plus comes in three sizes; 500 gigabytes for about $119, 750 gigabytes for $129 and 1 terabyte for $139. Clearly, Seagate is encouraging consumers to buy the largest capacity hard drives with this pricing scheme.