Under the U3 menu screen you'll find a list of any U3-enabled programs that you've downloaded as well as several management menu items, including add/delete programs, drive settings, help/support options, and the security setup menu for enabling encryption and setting up your password. You'll also find the SanDisk Backup application, which enables the "one-touch" back-up feature on the drive.

Each time it's pressed, the one-touch button backs up all your pre-selected files and folders.

While the back-up settings are self-explanatory, I liked the help screen; it's automatically populated with information about backup settings as you mouse over the icons. If you're not familiar with backup options, this will be a handy tool.

Speed

The drive backs up remarkably fast. I first backed up 1,991 files, -- a mixture of text documents, photos and videos -- in about 45 seconds. Obviously, backups are pointless without the ability to retrieve data, and this drive's restore feature works flawlessly and quickly. Restoring all of those files to a desktop folder took about five seconds.

There is also an "archive" feature that allows you to store your previous backup in a separate folder on the drive and start a backup in a folder. And with the drive's "clean up" feature, you can also permanently delete a previously archived backup and start a new backup in a new folder.

The Ultra Backup USB Drive is billed as a "high speed" device, which means nothing than that it uses USB 2.0 and should deliver data transfer rates of up to 480Mbits/sec. Since the packaging says high speed, that means benchmark testing.

I used ATTO Technology's ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.3.4, and Simpli Software's HD Tach v3.0.4 benchmarking utilities to perform my read/write performance tests. ATTO showed that the drive had an 18.4MB/sec. write rate and a burst speed of 27.4MB/sec. HD Tach showed an average write rate of 19MB/sec., an average read rate of 23.6MB/sec., and a burst speed of 27.6MB/sec. CPU utilization was 11% and random access time was 0.6 milliseconds.

By comparison, the IronKey Secure USB flash drive -- the fastest I've yet tested -- offers 31MB/sec. burst speed, 29.6MB/sec. average write speed and 22% CPU utilization. Another good-performing drive is the Corsair Survivor, which offers 25.1MB/sec burst speeds, 23.6MB/sec average read speed and 4% CPU utilization.

Overall, this is a very cool little drive with respectable speed and plenty of conveniences, though at about $6.25 per gigabyte of capacity, you're paying a premium for those creature comforts. But if you like the idea of backing up data on a device the size of a pack of gum with the press of a finger, I can recommend the SanDisk.