I didn’t intentionally set out to focus my portion of Qwowi’s 2008 Tech Gift Guide on products for data protection, backup and recovery, but well, clearly that’s what’s happened.  I’m fine with that because, although it’s safe to assume that backup, recovery, and archiving solutions (or BURA as we call it in the industry) aren’t high on most people’s wishlists, they darn well should be.  Now maybe I’ve got protection on the brain because Santa probably isn’t going to bring me a 17″ Macbook Pro, and so I just had to rebuild my Vista laptop.  Of course, it ain’t so bad for me because I have backups, but for the average,  and probably slightly misguided home user who thinks everything will be just fine if I they just continue to do nothing, it’s time for a wakeup call.  And that call, well today it sounds a lot like Rebit, or ribbit…I’m not sure, but it definitely sounds like a frog.

What’s a Rebit?

I’ll fess up to now knowing what a Rebit was until somebody asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing one.  All of the details can be found on the company’s website, but my version goes a little something like this:

Rebit is an external USB hard drive.  Unlike other external solutions, which can be used as “just a hard drive”, the Rebit isn’t designed, nor will it let you, use it as basic external storage.  Instead, it’s designed to provide complete, real-time, continuous backups (more like synchronizations) of everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) on your PC’s internal drives.  Now I don’ t have any inside information, but I think I have a good idea how it works – and my guess is that involves things like Windows Change Journals and other such nonsense that the average user probably never has heard of, and certainly doesn’t want to concern himself with.  But that’s the beauty of Rebit.  It does some pretty complicated things to make sure it always has the most up to date copy of any given file on your computer, and it does it all with you barely even knowing it’s there.

Installing & Configuring Rebit

To get Rebit up and running all you need to do is plug it in to your PC via USB.  Because its innards are comprised of a laptop-sized hard drive, it doesn’t require an external power source.  In most cases, a single USB port is sufficient to power the device.  If your computer can’t provide enough juice over one port, the Rebit’s USB cable has a second plug which you can use for additional USB power.

As soon as you plug in the Rebit you’ll be prompted to “Start” Rebit.  You’ll need to click OK to the license agreement as well.  After that you can pretty much forget Rebit exists.  It will do everything it needs to do, and it won’t need any additional help from you.

It’s worth mentioning that Rebit will install a couple of service on your PC.  It will also kick off a couple of additional processes when you login to Windows.  It sounds like a lot, but I found Rebit’s resource footprint to be practically non-existent; certainly far less than any backup solution I’ve seen to date.

Backing Up with Rebit

This is normally the part where I spend 500+ words talking about using whatever product I happen to be reviewing at the time.  I really can’t do that with the Rebit, because there’s absolutely nothing you “do” with a Rebit.  It sits on your desk (or wherever you happen to put it) and grabs all the data on your PC.  If something changes, it grabs the changes.  It will grab changes upon changes upon changes, and it will keep every version along the way as long as it has the space to do so.  Rebit will back up everything on your computer’s internal drives; documents, programs, image files, settings…again, EVERYTHING.

Unlike the native backup solution that ships with the more expensive versions of Windows Vista, you can actually use it to restore a single program (Windows backup doesn’t backup EXE files), and unlike many other 3rd party backup utilities, you can use Rebit to completely rebuild your PC without having to reinstall Windows first.  Sound too good to be true?  Well it isn’t, but there are some ,well…

Limitations

I’ve mentioned it twice already, but for the sake of clarity, Rebit will only backup your internal hard drives.  If you have large external disks that you’re using for storing things like images, music, and movies, Rebit’s going to pretend like they’re not even there.  Because Rebit is a zero configuration solution, it stands to reason there aren’t any configuration options.  While for most people that’s great, it does mean you don’t have the ability to exclude file/folders from your Rebit backups.

Continuing with the theme of “Rebit backups up everything”, you’ll need to make sure your Rebit is adequately sized.  If the size of your data exceeds the size of your Rebit, well, Rebit is pretty much useless – as I found out when I tried to use my sample unit to back up my primary workstation (luckily I have a smaller laptop I can use for testing).  When Rebit starts to fill up, you can’t decide what to keep and what to get rid of.  Rebit makes that decision for you, and it’s always going to decide to replace the oldest data first.  The moral of the story here; make sure your Rebit is bigger than the sum total of all your hard drives.  My recommendation is to buy the biggest Rebit you can (currently 500 GB).  Since Rebit will keep taking snapshot after snapshot, there’s really nothing to lose by buying a little bit more than you think you need, besides, chances are your disk space consumption is going to increase.

Finally, Rebit can back up one and only one computer.  Don’t think you can go moving it from system to system to backup all your data.  As soon as you configure it to back up once system, it will overwrite anything you’ve backed up on another (actually it does it own formatting, but you get the picture).

Finally, the Rebit isn’t Mac compatible, but that should be okay, because the label on the bottle of Apple Kool-Aid my brother gave me says Macs never ever never never have any problems whatsoever.

Restoring from Rebit

When restoring from Rebit you have few different options.   If you want to restore the most recent copy of a file, simply use Windows Explorer to locate the file on your Rebit.  From there, copy and paste it back to the original location (or anywhere else on your PC you might want to put it).

The simplest form of restore from the Rebit is your everyday copy and paste.  Locate the file or folder you wish to restore on your Rebit (Windows Explorer), copy the file you want to restore, and paste it to the location on your computer.  You can either restore over the existing file/folder, or drop your copy in an alternative location.  Whatever you want, I assure you Rebit doesn’t care.  If you’re not looking to replace a deleted file, but rather to fall back to a previous version of an existing file, the process is ever so slightly more complicated.

To restore a previous version of an existing file, locate that file (on your PC, not the Rebit), right-click, find the frog,  and select either “Browse My Rebit”, or one of the previous versions listed.  Incidentally, choosing “Browse My Rebit” opens an explorer window showing you the same files that appear on the previous versions list.   Selecting the file from the list opens it in the appropriate application allowing you to modify and save.  The Browse feature allows you to drag and drop (copy and paste) a previous version to wherever it is you want to put it.

Finally, Rebit offers what I’ll call the nuclear (or nookuler if you prefer) option for restores.  If your computer completely blows up (fried mother board, toasted hard drive), or gets poached (anyone else feel like breakfast right now?), you can completely restore your system from the Rebit, without having to reinstall Windows first.  A bare metal recovery option for home users; how cool is that?  It’s Alaska in February cool.

Simply attach your Rebit to the “new” computer, and boot up using the Rebit Recovery CD.  Choose the system you wish to restore (there should only be one).  If your Rebit to data ratio is big enough, you’ll have multiple versions of your system to recover from.  So choose the one you want to get back (likely the most recent), choose a target (hint: restore C to C and E to E and so on and so forth), and click Commit.  Once you’ve navigated the prompts, you might as well go make that breakfast I’ve been talking about, because it may take a while (several hours), but when the restore completes, you’ll have a fully functional Windows system with all of your “stuff” waiting for you.  How cool is that?  It’s August in Antarctica cool (I had to look that one up).

Final Thoughts

In the span of less than two weeks I’ve gone from never having heard of the Rebit to being totally enamored with the thing.  Since the copy I got isn’t big enough to hold all my data, I’m going to give it to my wife to use with her laptop (while I think about getting a bigger one for myself).  Its size coupled with the fact that it doesn’t require external power, makes it extremely portable, and darn near ideal for mobile users looking for some form of data protection.

I’m also going to mention it to my boss as a possible solution for our mobile executive’s backup needs.  I’ll also recommend it to any of my friends who aren’t technically inclined, but know enough to know they should be backing up their computers.  I wouldn’t recommend it for my mother, but that’s only because you actually have to plug the drive into the computer before it will backup your data.

If you’re looking for massive external storage with backup capability, the Rebit probably isn’t the best solution, however; if you’re looking for an effortless, worry-free, and robust backup and recovery solution for your home PC or laptop, I’d highly recommend the Rebit.  It’s a great little device, and well, the frog logo is pretty cool (Albany in December) too.

The Rebit is currently available in sizes of 160GB ($169.95) , 320GB ($189.95), and 500GB (219.95).  It can be purchased directly from Rebit, and from online retailers like Newegg.com.

Check out all the reviews that make up Qwowi’s 2008 Tech Gift Guide.