Maxtor "SafetyDrill" Backup Doesn't Work Reliably

A couple of months ago, I bought a Maxtor OneTouch Mini 4, primarily because of its “SafetyDrill” software. This promises to create a drive image (a la Norton’s “Ghost”) which can be restored using a bootable Linux CD. You pop the CD in, it boots to Linux and does a “bare metal” restore of your drive, bit by bit. So in theory you don’t have to worry about open programs, etc. It sounded like a great idea, although I said at the time that I had not been able to test it. Well, now I have tested it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, at least not reliably. I had to rebuild my laptop over Thanksgiving, so my first thought was, “fine, I’ll just restore the image.”  Didn’t work – wouldn’t recognize the hard drive to restore to.

Called Tech Support, they had me download a newer CD image. That at least recognized my hard drive, but the “Restore” button was greyed out. By chance, I switched the language to French, which brought back the “Restore” button which stayed accessible even after switching back to English.

But nothing happened when I clicked “Restore.”  OK, maybe the image was bad – I had one from just a week earlier. That one wouldn’t restore either.

Called Tech Support again. The long and short of it was that “something on your machine must be conflicting with the software.” However since my machine is a Dell Latitude 630 laptop, it is not exactly unusual. Besides, this is supposed to be Linux-based and machine independent.

So the bottom line is – it just doesn’t work. For what it’s worth, the Dell Tech Support guy (very helpful and knowledgeable), said they had had bad luck with the SafetyDrill software.

So the moral of the story is, stick with Ghost.

Comments

[Todd Stradford]

I didn't even get as far as the above person. Safetydrill would not even start to make a backup and gave an error about "OneTouch drive not configured for backup." Couldn't find anything on that at the Seagate site FAQ, but did find numerous problems with this software. Never could find anyplace to configure the drive in the Maxtor Manager other than to set percent of drive to use for images and notification intervals. Downloaded newer version with same error and no configuration options. Your best bet is to not even use SafetyDrill and get something else.
XP SP3 with a SCSI HD. Maybe the software wasn't written to recognize anything as arcane as SCSI.

My final solution was to uninstall MaxtorManager and not waste anymore time trying to even make an image with it. The drive itself works fine as an external drive, but I distrust any of the software that came with it.