Seagate Mirra Sync and
Share Personal Server

Backup all your computers
to one storage device!

The Seagate Mirra Sync and Share Personal Server is a network attached storage offering designed with the small office or home office in mind. And it certainly can be a computer backup device for just one PC as well. It is affordable ($350 - $550), small, quiet and bundled with software easy enough for almost anyone to use to backup his or her essential data.

In fact, the "share" portion of this unit works through a free account that you setup through the software itself to a web server that facilitates access to your data when you are away or to friends, family or coworkers in other locations. This is a quantum leap above trying to share files from your PC over the internet, and could be a sole reason for purchase of a personal server instead of, say, an external USB hard drive.

Front and Back of the Seagate Mirra Personal Server (Black plastic caps have been removed from video, printer and serial ports).

After spending some time with the Seagate Mirra 500GB personal server, this device gets a "qualified" thumbs up from me. I say qualified for a couple of reasons. Seagate is very up front about this device being a backup to your hard drive, not a place to store your files. There is no redundancy built in to the unit, nor is there that option.

What they aren't as up front about is this: the device is only accessible through the Seagate Mirra software. You CAN NOT access it as a normal file share or networked drive. For that reason I have a bit of a problem with it being titled a personal "server". To me, a personal server is a device with resources I can access - not just my software can access.

For that reason, I recommend this product for novice or average users as a computer backup device.

I think it would be a bit disappointing to power users; I certainly was disappointed to determine this.

One additional disappointment is the speed of the network interface. At 10/100 full duplex, it may match most PC's and switches out there today. But with 8 port gigabit switches at less than $75 and any decent new PC equipped with gigabit ethernet, would it really have cost Seagate that much more to upgrade to gigabit on this "server"?

The Mirra Software is everything

I will give Mirra credit for some easy to use software. It's wizard driven, and seems to do a fair job of suggesting what files to backup. But you do have to specify what directories and files you want backed up, it won't do the entire drive.

Once you configure it, the software works in the background to keep the data synced between your PC and the Mirra Server. An icon in the task tray will give you feedback as to how and what it's doing at any given time.

This IS NOT a complete disaster recovery solution

If you are looking for a complete backup and recovery solution, I would probably steer you toward a drive imaging program. See this backup success story to see a program like that in action.

Continue to:

screen shots of the software

short video of the Linux boot process behind the scenes