For years, I have been harping on faithful readers to back up their computers -- or at least the data they want to keep.
A good portion of my computer business is recovering data from failed hard drives after people have failed to heed that advice. They usually have lost everything, including their wedding photos, the photos of their children, their master's thesis and all kinds of other irreplaceable stuff.
The trouble with backup routines is that people often fail to actually run them. They are too much of a hassle, people forget, or the process saps their computer power. Or, they find backing up their entire computer takes up too much space on a backup drive. That's because today's cavernous hard drives are very hard to back up.
I recently ran into a product called "Rebit" that has changed my mind about backup.
This product comes in two flavors. One is a software product for $49.95 that installs on an existing external hard drive, which you provide. Ideally, the external drive should be at least as large as the combined size of the drives you are trying to back up in the single computer. So for example, if you have a 320 gig hard drive then I would get a 500 gig external.
Once installed, the Rebit software takes over the drive and all that the user really needs to do is plug the external drive's USB cable into the host computer. The first time the cable is plugged in, the Rebit software takes over and does a complete backup of the computer. It does the entire computer, so if you lose your hard drives you will be back in business in a matter of an hour.
Once the first backup is complete -- which does not really slow down your host computer -- then every time you plug the cable in again, the software does what is called an "incremental" backup. This means it backs up the files that have been added or changed since the last time. This usually takes just a few minutes. This backup is added to the first one. The process continues until the drive fills. Then the oldest backups are tossed away, making the whole system is self-maintaining.
If you lose your hard drive, you boot to your Rebit CD, insert the USB cable and your computer is fully restored to your new hard drive and you're back up and running as if nothing has happened.
Faithful readers will note that I have been using Acronis for this task for years. But I find Rebit is easier, faster and more likely to be used.
If you don't have an external drive already, Rebit sells drives with the software already installed. This option is a tad pricey but it saves you the hassle of installing and configuring it. However, it is much cheaper to get a giant drive on the open market. Just get one with power management (one that doesn't run all the time) so you don't risk having the drive burn up.
Overall I love Rebit. You can get the details at www.rebit.com
(James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and a tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim(at)cyberdads.com)
COMPUTER CENTRAL
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