Seagate & Amazon Announce Cloud Syncing External Hard Drive ‘Duet’

We’ve talked time and time again about the importance of backing up your important data, but all too often, people don’t take that warning seriously enough, and it can bite them in the worst way possible. Simply put, it sucks to lose data that you know you can never get back. It’s made even more frustrating when you realize after-the-fact that the loss could have been (easily) prevented.

Seagate has made it no secret that it feels the same way (as you’d expect for a hard drive vendor), and now Amazon is reiterating that in a real way: the two companies have teamed up to release a special external hard drive optimized for Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon Drive.

There’s no word on what kind of hard drive is underneath the Duet’s shroud, not even on the official product page. That leads me to believe it’s 5,400 RPM, which is still more than suitable for a backup drive.

For its $100 price, the 1TB Duet comes with a free year of Amazon Drive’s unlimited package, valued at $60-per-year. This price is important to keep in mind, because if you plan to continue using the drive’s cloud backup capabilities after that free year, that’s how much you’ll be paying (unless Amazon changes its price, of course).

For those who are notoriously bad with backing data up, that price, along with this drive, will be easily justified. Whenever the drive is plugged in, its data will upload to Amazon’s servers. That way, if the drive dies, you will still have a good backup of your data.

This is a product that’s really designed for those who might not even know how to backup data. For everyone else, less expensive offerings can be had and can be tied in with custom cloud solutions easily enough. Still, it’s great to have such a simple option available, because the market for those who could use this probably dwarfs the one for those who can go the DIY route.