It’s that time of year again when the new iphone is introduced and like a lemming I placed my order withing seconds and now I just got one of the first batch, the new pro max model. While I admire the convenience of just saying yes a few times and having the new phone replicate everything in my old one, which is being traded in, this year is a little different. It has some major changes to the operating system and I decided to start fresh with the tedious task of reinstalling everything. That task can have its dangers though and I’ve spent all morning trying to do a backup to my Macbook and it didn’t go well. So backing up to an external drive seemed even safer, if it worked as I hoped. WHY SANDISK As soon as I started shopping my eyes started to glaze over, there were pages and pages of thumb drives and for some inexplicable reason most of them still had lightning connectors, which means I would have to use a chancy adapter. I don’t get it, we are at least a couple of generations removed from that now obsolete connector and companies are still selling drives at full price. Then I saw this one from SanDisk and I thought my search was over. This is a brand I have trusted for years and the first thing that caught my attention was that it has the now standard USB-C connector as well as the universal USB-A connector. As my cloud backup is only 8GB I chose one of the smallest sizes I could get, based primarily on the fact that I could get it the same day so I can do my back and start using my new phone. DOES IT WORK This question has to be either yes or no, it either does the job or it doesn’t. So as soon as it arrived I plugged it in. There’s no need to get into techie specs with something like this, in today’s world there rarely is such a thing as slow. Another thing we expect in today’s world is for something to do the job it was purchased for. On one hand, if judged simply as a thumb drive this one is okay – slightly overpriced and slightly cheesy construction. On the other hand they heavily promote this as a simple plug-in backup device for smartphones. What they don’t make clear is they don’t mean all smartphones. This is clearly intended more for the Android crowd and that’s the biggest strike against it – if plugged in to a current iphone it does absolutely nothing (in terms of self-running a useful backup app). In the tiniest font possible on the back of the hanger card they tell you, after you’ve already bought the product and brought it home, that it may not be compatible will all devices and they give you a website. Unfortunately that link is broken. By now it is clear that this is not what I expected. So I searched their website, which is actually Western Digital’s website, and deeply buried in there (it took about 10 minutes to unearth it) behind a lot of conflicting information I finally learned that to use with an iphone I have to manually locate the Files folder and drag those to the SanDisk … but not all files are located there, it takes a separate task to locate and save photographs, that still leaves some files that I would like backed up. In their FAQ tools they seem to make it clear that this really isn’t a backup drive for an iPhone after all. It sounded too good to be true. YES NO MAYBE I’m splitting my opinion two ways on this. On one hand it is a decent generic flash drive from a company with a good reputation. On the other hand it is basically useless as a plug and play solution to easily backup my Apple phone. Additionally I would like to see a bit more rugged enclosure. The plastic reminds me of the cheap flash drives they give away for free at carnivals and trade shows and does not give me confidence that my data is protected against physical damage. The balance of all that results in a score of three for average, not bad for some uses and not so good for others.