SlashGear Japan
Perhaps my favourite gadgets are those which, at first glance, seem a fantastic idea but, after you ponder on them a little, turn out to have a potentially ridiculous flaw. Polaroid’s new ClickFree photo backup drive might just slot nicely into that category. The concept is simple: you plug it in to your PC via USB, turn it on, and it automatically searches out any images on your hard-drive and copies them to its internal 2.5-inch drive.
So what’s wrong with that? Well, there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell it not to bother backing up every tiny gif or jpeg in your temporary internet files folder, the Windows uses as icons, that get left behind from webpages and generally clutter the place up. Polaroid’s boast that there’s no need to establish particular archive folders is all well and good, except that means there’s no obvious discrimination between your precious holiday photos and the remnants of that “hot sexy ladies” pop-up you told your wife was an accident.
If you’re still interested it can apparently hold up to 40,000 images, as well as print and burn CDs direct from the device (if you plug in a printer or CD burner, I presume, since it has neither built in). Yours for around $140.
One Response to “Photo backup drive is image-omnivore”
e April 9, 2007
I saw this at CES in January and picked one up for my Dad. It’s cool because it works as advertised, which means I don’t have to install any software and crap in order to get it to work.
I was curious about your comments about the extra Internet cache files and such. I dug into the app settings and it skips over the System-related files by default. One thing I also noticed (although it turns out this was all over the packaging) is that it can also pull out your photos from within your e-mails too. Now THAT’s cool.
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