Worked great for backups but cannot restore
357516
Bought it 2 years ago and I would use it to backup 3 computers.
I would connect the backup drive and let it do its' backup about every 2 months or so then put it in my fire safe.
When the hard drive failed in a computer, I whipped out my restore CD and tried to do a 'bare metal' restore onto a new drive.
I followed all the prompts and the little progress bar completed the 'preparing new drive' in about 30 seconds.
Then it appeared to be doing something for a few more seconds then it announced that all my data had been restored.
No way it could have restored gigabytes of data in a few seconds.
Sure enough, it did not restore anything.
This software is useless if it cannot restore.
3814519
I formatted it to NTFS and made it a bootable drive. Worked fine for a week, then started hanging up on boot.
Eventually wouldn't reformat and now has bad sectors. I wouldn't use it for anything but data transfer, and wouldn't
trust it with important storage.
3850378
I bought 2 LaCie Big Disk Extreme Drives in July of 2008 to store my photographs. I am a professional photographer and thought that backing up my data on not one, but 2 external hard drives was the responsible thing to do. By the fall of 2010 both drives had simply stopped working. I had my data recovered but all the images are corrupted. A puzzling thing happened when the data recovery company was working on my drive. They found PC files on the drive as well as my Mac files. No one else had used the drives other than me and I use Apple products exclusively. I am able to view some of the files but not open them and I am pretty sure that someone else's data was on the disks as well as mine. I suspect that LaCie slipped me refurbished drives and sold them as brand new. Save your money. I am now using a Free Agent Go Flex and crossing my fingers.
1450395
It works fine for a flash drive, but doesn't work with my backup hard drive.
578833
I bought this Hdd a bit more than a year ago ... and I have used mostly for backup every 3 or four weeks... Now I carried with me for a trip with me in my briefcase. I got Ok to the destination I was able to see files and then when I attempted to backup my last files from the site, Win 8.1 informed me that there were not files there and If I wanted to format the drive, which obviously I didn't. Attempted to do the same from Win7 prof and it didn't work either. Now I am trying to see if SP customer support can provide a way to recover my files.
2800020
It was working fine but then one day it just stopped working without any signs. It just would not mount any more. I was so scare cuz I was backing all my work project files in there. Then I prayed to God so hard that it would work once more and it did ONCE MORE!! I then backed all my files up to other drive. Thank God!! I was hoping that it would last much more than just 2 years of regular usages. Always it's a good idea to backup in two drives. A good lesson learned.
1288349
It is a good automatic backup,but not as easy to restore,it takes time and needs more than basic knowledge. I tried to restore one of my computers about five times and i still do not have all my files restored. Also easy fix can be a lot easier.
128237
This is a very nice hard drive which I use to back up all my PC's files including HD videos. It uploads and downloads rapidly using an eSATA connection. Fortunately, I have not had to use the restore function to test unit's ability to restore a bad internal drive. So I cannot evaluate that particular function.

My one complaint centers on the use of eSATA connections which do not allow me to configure RAID. The external hard drive cannot be found in the device manager to allow this configuration. This would probably not be a problem if Firewire or USB connections were used. The good news is that now I have all 4 TBs for storage instead of just 2.
1831623
I bought this to back up files and photos across my three household computers. I have a PC for work, a Macbook for pleasure, and an old desktop with Linux Ubuntu for storage and fooling around. I plugged in the Tuoro to the Linux desktop right out of the box and transferred about 50GB of family photos onto it. It worked great. Then, I took it over to my Mac and tried to transfer all the files onto my Mac's hard drive. Some of the folders transferred over with no problems what-so-ever. Other folders just stalled and slowed to a stop, failing to transfer some of my files, and failing to identify which files were correctly transferred. Another downside to this drive is that in order to ADD files to it from a Mac, you need to reformat the whole drive beforehand.

Summary: If you're looking for backup for one system, this drive will probably be ok. If you're looking to back up multiple systems in a plug-and-play format across systems, I'd look elsewhere.
3341715
Been using it for months to back up to multiple drives daily -- no problems with backup or restore. Tip: Boot from the Acronis disc to clone your OS drive. Don't mess with such a backup while running Windows. Interface could be much better. So could functionality. I don't like how it manages deletion of backups when you want to do this manually. But I find this to be a solid utility. I had to stop using Ghost because it locked up my system when backing up the OS drive.
3047065
I ordered this to replace an older hard drive which had movie files ripped to it and I was going to use it as a backup drive for my PC.  It was easy to install however I could not back up windows to it which was the main reason for getting it.  I ended up using another 1TB drive for that purpose which was a firewire connection.  I did however decide to use it for other storage purposes including storing all my home movie dvds.  Once they were copied over they would not play.  They appeared to have all the data required but wouldn't open up nd fully play.  they would play a few minutes then freeze and yes I checked my player to make sure that was fine and it was, just wouldn't work for these. Oh well, time to look for another external drive to rip them too
593066
I just bought one from local CompUSA store. After I loaded my photos and videos from Alaska trip, it died on me, giving constant cranking sounds. I am just hoping that I can recover my photos from it or I will be dead!
663571
I used this for about a week just printed out my return shipping label. I was all about the "Eggs in one basket" thought process. Put all my pictures, music, documents on this device and then access it from the 5 other computers in the house. Sounds good.  Problem is, you cannot back this device up to a cloud service (like Carbonite, Mozy, etc) even if you map a drive to it from a host PC with that software installed.  That is a limitation of the cloud backup software I understand.  The work around is to backup the WD drive to a share on your computer and then have your cloud service back up that backup. Seems ridiculous to me....redundant data.  If WD was smart: They would create a cloud service that this thing could back up to directly!

The secondary reasons are:
1.)  UI was very slow for me...unresponsive at times.
2.)  I could hear the drive constantly running without being accessed by any computers (that i knew of!).

As I type this I'm waiting to perform a factory restore so I can send it back!
453289
I bought a drobo 5n plus 3 red WD drives about six months ago.  I set up an auto back up using microsoft sync toy... it runs every night.  it has worked flawlessly... i don't worry anymore about local backup (I still need to get a copy of my stuff off-site...) and when I run out of space (I'm down to <1 TB of space left) I just buy another 2TB drive for <$100 and I'm good for another year or so!!  Happy that bit the bullet six months ago.
3093650
I used this to back up my files at work only to have my backup crash.  Very debilitating for business.
1854444
I hoped to use this neat little unit to back-up my Win8 system, i.e. for storing a system image.  Windows recognizes the device but unfortunately, the Windows backup application says that it cannot use this device to store a system image because it is not formatted with NTFS.  I have e-mailed Bipra tech support to asked if it can be reformatted and await their reply.
Update: Bipra responded to my e-mail promptly.  I reformatted the device for NTFS and the back-up went smoothly.  I have gone from very disappointed to completely satisfied with it.  My only grip, and it's a small one, is that product description might have clarified the potential formatting issue.
4427928
I have a couple of these and use them for Mac / OS X Time Machine backup disks. Find a Windows computer that died due to viruses, remove its hard disk, install it in this enclosure, connect the USB cable, erase it using Disk Utility, and designate it as a Time Machine backup. They have been very reliable and installation couldn't be easier.