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…