SanDisk Ultra Backup Flash Drive Review

The Ultra Backup's matte black paint is contrasted by an aesthetically pleasing glossy trim with smooth curving lines, but is ultimately marred by fingerprints and light scuffs from so much as a fingernail. Accenting the design is a dark orange pulsating activity light and a bright USB connector insert. Compared to SanDisk's Cruzer Micro drives, the lightweight casing feels rather hollow, even moreso compared to the Cruzer Titanium, so I wouldn't imagine that it'd hold up against the crushing forces of my SUV particularly well.

Improvements over SanDisk's flagship Contour line include the return of the lanyard hole for strapping on to necks and keychains, and a sliding retractable USB connector that can be operated with only one hand. The packaging is devoid of any lanyard, pouch or keychain attachments, a major disappointment considering the price of the drive. One might then argue that the pricing premium is better spent on the drive's sole distinguishing feature: an actual backup button located just above the slider. I say give us both.

U3 - Love It or Leave It
Like most of SanDisk's flash drives currently on the market, the Ultra Backup features their proprietary U3 portable application platform - a brilliant idea that has been riddled with stagnation and some criticism for being considered intrusive. We host a U3 primer for newbies here at Everything USB, but in a nutshell the flash drive pretends to be a CD-ROM in order to jump-start Windows' Auto-Run feature. From there the U3 LaunchPad is loaded, acting as a host to portable applications meant to be ran off the drive rather than installed on the host computer.

Ideally, these portable U3 apps should leave no traces with personal information behind in the file system or Windows registry, though non-identifiable traces do remain. For students, library members and cyber cafe patrons, U3 was seen as a breakthrough technology; one that I have heavily advocated in the past. Road warriors can hop from one computer to another, keeping their productivity suites, games and various utilities with them at all times.

Innovation aside, many have complained that U3's use of two drive letters, potential incompatibility with embedded devices, and use of the Auto Run function make U3 more of a nuisance than it's worth compared to newer competing platforms like John Haller's PortableApps freeware suite. To be fair, not all embedded devices are dumbfounded when presented with a U3 drive; though photo kiosks are often incompatible, a Sony Xplod car stereo reads U3 drives just fine. What really hurts the U3 platform though is that many applications still on the U3 portal haven't seen any updates in years! For example, at least four of the top ten U3 apps - Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, and OpenOffice - were last patched in 2007 and are left wide open to a number of security flaws that have since been addressed. The delivery of some of these applications through the U3 Software Portal is also a joke since many are hosted on RapidShare; nothing quite surpasses the joy of waiting for my downloads to start.

Currently I'm of the opinion that the only saving grace of U3 is its ability to prevent the data partition from being mounted until a password is entered, and even that can be a bit of a hassle. The secure-all or secure-none approach taken by SanDisk is ham-fisted compared to dual-partition or encrypted file volume setups, rendering the drive inaccessible on Linux computers, embedded devices and more if left protected. Macintosh users are no longer excluded from accessing the secure volume, however, having finally received password utilities and an uninstaller for U3 that work on OS X 10.4 and 10.5, though these do require installation on the host machine and aren't ideal for a Mac computer lab. At least Windows users will enjoy being able to secure data on the go without administrative rights.

Data stored on the Ultra Backup drive is protected by more than just a password though; according to SanDisk, each drive generates a unique key used to secure each and every file with 128-bit AES encryption. The entire process is transparent to the user and handled by the drive's hardware controller, not affecting read or write speeds in the slightest. This layer of encryption means that one cannot simply take the flash memory and solder it onto a non-U3 drive to bypass the protection.

Most importantly, the U3 flash drive will self-destruct if an invalid password is entered 5 times in a row, presumably by deleting the encryption key and generating a new one. After that, the drive requires erasure before it could be used again. Testing this, I can confirm that all files are completely obliterated in the process; I was unable to find a single scrap of data in my suite of file recovery software.