We've repeatedly said that the best backup is the one you use. The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac (1TB) ($129 list) is a prime choice for the Mac user. It is fastest when copying files, which defines the backup process. Take it out of the box, plug it in, and say yes when it asks you to use Time Machine. What could be easier? It's got more storage space than our current portable drive Editor's Choice, so the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac is a great choice for those who value storage space over raw speed.

Design and Features

The Backup Plus Portable for Mac looks very much like the Editors' Choice ($139.99 list, 4.5 stars) drive we reviewed earlier this year. Both are compact, portable drives with a removable USM (Universal Storage Module) interface adapter on one end. The USM interface lets you swap out the included USB 2.0/3.0 interface to connect the drive to optional adapters for Thunderbolt ($99) or FireWire 800 ($25). Though the adapters are extra, they are the same as the ones used for Seagate's previous GoFlex line of drives, so if your business uses that older line of drives, you can share adapters. The drive measures about 0.57 by 3.25 by 5 inches (HWD), so it fits easily in your coat pocket or commute bag. The drive light is on the USM adapter, which leaves the drive body itself featureless save a raised Seagate logo. The top of the drive case is painted a matte silver to match your MacBook Air or Pro, while the rest of the drive is basic white.

The drive inside has a 1TB capacity, with a less expensive 500GB ($109.99 list) option in case you don't want a whole Terabyte of storage. The drive is formatted HFS+ out of the box, so it will work with Time Machine right away. The drive comes with an installer for Seagate Dashboard, which is an optional program that can be used to backup and share photos from social media sites like Flickr or Facebook. People who already use iPhoto for this purpose may not need to install the program, but it's useful for those users that mainly use their smartphone to post images to these social media sites. One plus is that the program lives alongside Time Machine instead of taking over the drive. Seagate includes a two-year warranty, double that of other more basic drives.

Performance

The Backup Plus Portable for Mac is a decent drive for those with USB 3.0-equipped Macs, which are MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac systems built in 2012. You're going to get much slower performance if you run the drive on an older Mac with USB 2.0-only ports. That said, the drive will work with older Macs with the aforementioned lower performance. The Backup Plus Portable took a scant thirteen seconds to copy our 1.2 GB test folder over, which is a lot faster than the , which took much longer (19 seconds USB 3.0, 22 seconds FireWire 800). Older drives like the ($174 list, 3 stars) took over forty seconds to copy the same file over USB 2.0. This means that the Backup Plus is well suited to the task at hand: copying files over so they can be saved in case your primary storage goes bad (which it will eventually).

The Backup Plus Portable isn't quite as prolific in sustained throughput tests, running the kind of tasks you'd expect for a video editor. The Backup Plus only managed a 90MBps write and 107 MBps read score on the AJA System test. Our current Editors' Choice for portable hard drives, the ($199 list, 4.5 stars) is better suited to that task with a blazing 200 MBps write and 379 MBps read throughput score on the same test. Keep the Seagate drive as a backup drive, rather than a scratch disk for graphics tasks. If you must use a drive for high-end graphics work, use a SSD or a spinning desktop-class drive.

For Mac users who want to back up their digital life, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac (1TB) is an economical choice. It's capacious, has a decent dollar per GB ratio (it's $10 less expensive than the generic Seagate Backup Plus drive we reviewed earlier), and it comes ready for Time Machine. It's got the same strengths as the more generic model, plus its silver visage will match your Mac better. It's not as fast as the Editors' Choice winning LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt, and the Seagate requires a $99 adapter for Thunderbolt, so the LaCie holds on to its Editors' Choice title for now. But if all you need is backup, the Seagate Backup Plus is perfectly named.

COMPARISON TABLE

