Lacie Rugged Safe

Lacie offers a range of portable hard disks for carrying data around with you, but if you are going to be carrying personal documents, it’s worth worrying about what would happen if the disk were lost or stolen.

The Lacie Rugged Safe offers several features, both inside and out, to help protect the data on the disk. As well as having a rugged, rubber sleeve wrapped around the exterior, the disk inside the device is also held in place by anti-shock dampeners to prevent it from being damaged when dropped.

The disk has two connections for the computer, and whether you choose to attach it to the computer’s USB or Firewire sockets is up to you (both cables are supplied). It’s powered through the same cable, and while it should work without extra power, a second USB cable is supplied for users with laptops that don’t supply enough power through one USB socket.

The 'Safe' part of the drive's title refers to a sensor on the top of the unit that can read a fingerprint when a finger is swiped over it, granting access to the drive if the print is recognised. The Safe Manager software supplied was quick and easy to use and can set up an administrator account to control access along with up to ten fingerprints for individual users (or multiple fingers). If it can’t read your print the administrator password can be used to access data.

Any data stored is automatically safeguarded with powerful encryption on the disk itself so even if it’s removed from the case, files are still unreadable.

Finally, Lacie supplies the Genie Backup Manager software to create scheduled backups of your files, and this includes its own security features.

The physical and data security make the Rugged Safe one of the best portable disks we’ve seen, and during our tests we found it easy to configure and use. The fingerprint reader was accurate at correctly detecting a finger-swipe and granting or denying access.

Though this product is undoubtedly effective, it’s also expensive. It might be simpler and cheaper to just take care over which files you carry with you. But if you need secure transportation the Rugged Safe is a good choice.