Fabrik (pronounced fabric)might be an unfamiliar name to some of you, but they have a history. A good history which includes ex-Maxtor executives who helped pioneer the "One Touch" feature on Maxtor hard drives and who are now helping forge a new way of data back-up for Fabrik. Today, Fabrik launches its new professional hard drive line that adds an online, off-site back-up feature. The online back-up component isn't really a new technology, but it's the first time we've seen it matched with hardware and has a price point that's approachable for professionals and consumers. But before we jump into that let's break down this announcement into two parts: the hardware and the online back-up. The Fabrik Hard Drives Feast you eyes on the image above to see the three new Fabrik hard drive models. Of course, you notice that they're stackable. Now let's take a closer look at each, starting at the top of the pile and working down. The first drive is the Fabrik Simple Drive, appropriately named as it features a USB 2.0 connection and a security slot. Not much there really, but as an entry level drive for the small biz owner it may be all you really need. The Fabrik Simple Drive ships in 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB capacities at $100, $130 and $170 respectively. Next hard drive down is the Fabrik Pro Drive which adds to the previous drive an eSATA connection and a smart fan (the fan turns on only when it's needed so that it stays quiet and cool). Fabrik's internal assessment of the eSATA throughput performance for the Pro Drive is benchmarked at 445 MB/sec. The Fabrik Pro Drive ships in 500 GB, 750 GB and 1TB capacities at $230, $330 and $530 respectively. Last, but not least, the top performing Fabrik Duo Pro Drive adds RAID 0 and RAID 1 to the previous Pro Drive model increasing the throughput to 856 MB/sec according to Fabrik. The Fabrik Duo Pro Drive ships in 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB capacities at $400, $600 and $800 respectively. All drives are now shipping. Overall, nothing terribly exciting about these drives, although we are happy to see eSATA and RAID for you power users. Where things get more exciting is on the software/data back-up side. The Back End Here's where things start to get interesting. Fabrik has a software solution that allows you to back-up you data to the hard drive itself (locally) as well as use it's online data service called Fabrick Ultimate BackUp to back-up your data to a secure, off-site data center. There's actually two services here; a free one with a 2 GB storage capacity (which is actually available to the general public) and an unlimited storage capacity that runs just $4.95 a month. What this means is that should anything happen to your drive (say, damage, failure, theft or anything else resulting in the loss of your data) Fabrik will have a copy of it. As an additional feature to those unfortunate customers who lost their critical data, but we're fortunate enough have it backed-up with Fabrik Ultimate BackUP, Fabrik will send you a hard copy of your data so that you can restore it. The cost for that service is yet to be determined. Meanwhile if you only lost part of you data a simple online restore will suffice. Either way, video professionals may enjoy knowing that their critical project files or media are safe and secure. The online back-up feature is a bottle neck of course for that first upload to the data center, but from that point on the service and hard drive only select the changed bits to be uploaded back to the service. That should save you some time. There are also settings for the service which will allow you to coordinate your uploads by schedule or when you computer is at rest. We're definitely intrigued by this new product and service and will be following up with a review to see just how painful or painless this process is for the videographer. So stay tuned.
