I’m so ticked at manufacturers of external (backup) hard drives made for Macs! All I want is a portable hard drive to back my system up on. Is that too much to ask for? Macs have Time Capsule, but it’s not really portable, and even though it does backups, it’s more of a wireless router. It’s expensive and heavy. I have one and don’t use it.

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought a 500 GB Seagate external hard drive for $90. I brought it home, looking forward to using its built in software to back up my system and do automatic backups whenever changes are made. That’s the whole point. The packaging said it was for PCs and Macs. It also said you don’t have to reformat it for Macs like you do with some products. Well, first, I DID have to reformat the hard drive because it was a Mac! I then installed the software and there was no place at all in the software’s interface which would have enabled me to back up my computer, let alone schedule any, etc. I was ticked. I called Seagate. They told me I needed Time Capsule, that their product couldn’t do what I wanted it to do. Um, false advertising, misleading packaging, whatever — I was TICKED!!! I took it back to Best Buy. I then bought a My Passport from Western Digital. I bought it because it was specifically for Macs. Same size, same price. I brought it home, hooked it up, and looked for a software interface to appear. Nothing. I downloaded the user manual and it said I should have gotten a screen about Time Capsule. I didn’t. I called Western Digital. The person I spoke with barely spoke English and had such a thick accent, I could hardly understand him. I did understand the following though: My Passport only works with Time Capsule — another external hard drive. Why the hell would I need two? I mean, what the hell is wrong with these people? I said that it said nothing on the packaging about that and that if it had, I wouldn’t have bought it. The rep was pretty speechless to that. I mean, what do you say, right? So, basically I have a hard drive that I can drag and drop folders and files onto and it will save them, but it can never update anything on its own and I have no way of tracking this stuff, so I wouldn’t know when to replace a file or folder with an updated one. It obviously can’t automatically back up my system. It’s pretty damn useless. I’ve moved some things on to it today, but really, if/when I ever update the stuff I moved, I won’t know if/when to update the hard drive because I won’t have remembered it. Isn’t that stupid as hell? I swear, isn’t packaging regulated? Shouldn’t both manufacturers have put on their packaging that their products couldn’t work without Apple’s own Time Capsule? What a joke. See if I ever buy another one of their products….