Clickfree C3 Wireless Automatic Backup product reviews

OK, this review was REALLY difficult to write. It started off heading steadily towards a definite "Don't bother!" but thanks to the intervention of an expert from CANADA became a resounding success... if you want to read more about the 'Saga of the C3 review..." you can find it on our blog in the February archives.  - or click here - 

So, forgetting about all the dramas, here's how it SHOULD pan out...

The box contains a small shiny black device about the size of two CD cases stacked on top of each other, a power cable, and some paperwork. That's it. The black box has a USB cable built into it, the power adapter is pretty small and light, and the paperwork just gives you some basic info.

Plugging the device into a USB port on the first machine you want to be able to back up is required. If your machine has AutoPlay enabled, you won't have to do anything - the device will fire up the installer and start to place the 'client' software on your machine. A few clicks to accept the EULA and configure your backup preferences, then it will learn the network settings and scan your machine for all backup-eligible files. You are advised to do your first backup 'direct' - while the device is still connected directly to the PC.

Once this is complete, you can disconnect the device and use it wirelessly or plug it into the next machine you want to have do wireless backups. If you decide to have multiple machines using this backup, I STRONGLY suggest you go into the scheduler and set the backups to be at LEAST 3 hours apart from each other, or on different days... trying to shift gigs of data from multiple machines at the same time would be... umm... bad.

Once you are ready to 'go wireless' - unplug the device from the USB port, plug the power supply in and you'll notice the light on the bottom turns orange. This indicates that the box is booting up and connecting to the wireless access point. "Booting up?" you say... yes... this little black box has a trimmed down linux box inside it, which boots up and controls the wireless connection. Once it is ready, the light will blink out and come back on blue. This can take up to 5 minutes. if it's still orange after 10 minutes, you have a problem - call the helpdesk!

Assuming it all works, you'll see a popup box on screen saying it has successfully communicated to the device through the wireless connection, and is ready to do backups. This is very good news!

The box runs on a 2.4GHz band, which means your bandwidth and transfer speeds won't be blazing, but they'll be sufficient to shift a fair bit of stuff. It took around 8 hours to backup 31gb of data wirelessly, which wasn't too bad at all really.

Overall, though there were teething troubles, it wasn't too bad after all the dramas were sorted out. The ongoing usage has proven itself well, with backups being significantly faster as it only backs up files that have changed since the last time, making for speedier and more efficient nightly/weekly/monthly backups. For home users, a weekly backup should be sufficient really, while businesses may want to look at multiple devices, one that does daily backups, one that does a weekly schedule, and a third that does monthly backups. Multiple levels of redundancy make for safer data. Thankfully these units come in 1TB capacities too, and hopefully 2TB units aren't too far off.