I have always been aware of the importance of backing up work but up until recently it was always one of those little jobs that I didn’t quite get round to doing often enough, my setup was a 160 GB Formac external hard drive attached to my old eMac.

While I didn’t have any problems with the Formac drive it had a built in fan which made the drive ridiculously noisy, also despite it’s relatively small storage size of 160 GB the drive was physically big - it took up a footprint of just under an A4 piece of paper and was the height of 2 and a half dvd cases laid flat. Because of it’s design it couldn’t really be stood on it’s end which would have saved a lot of desk space.Having upgraded my iMac to OS X Leopard it made sense to use it’s built in backup application Time Machine, but to get the most out of it I realised I would need a bigger and better external hard drive.

I decided early on that I wanted the drive to have more storage space than the iMac’s 500 GB internal hard drive and for speed I wanted a drive with a firewire connection.Having looked at various models by various manufactures including Lacie, Western Digital and Seagate I choose a 750GB Western Digital My Book, I almost went for the next model up that has 1TB of storage but the 750GB version seemed like better value.I have been using the My Book for a few weeks now and and it’s worked flawlessly with Time Machine, which runs in the background and is set to backup every hour.

Once the drive gets full Time Machine will delete older backups. You can also choose to exclude certain folders from the backup.The My Book is well built and size wise it’s slightly smaller in height than 4 dvd cases stood on end - it takes up very little desk space. The black plastic casing with rubber edging has a chunky feel and the glowing rings on the front are a nice touch. Most of the time the My Book is quiet, the only noise being occasional hard drive activity.

I would definitely recommend the My Book to OS X Leopard users wanting to use Time Machine, and the drive also works with both Windows XP and Vista.