Backup Solutions ...

There is a saying in IT organizations that nobody cares about backups - they only care about restores! Boy is that ever true. I am not going to belabor the importance of backups (or restores). I just want to give you some up-to-date information on several tools you can use to backup your data on an individual computer. If you have a Small Business with a server, there are other techniques and hardware that would better meet your needs. I will address some solutions for Small Businesses in a future post.

There are a number of products geared toward home/home-office backups. Rebit's Rebit, Seagate Technology's FreeAgent Pro and Maxtor OneTouch 4, and Western Digital's WD Passport, to name just a few, come with external hard drives of various sizes coupled with some type of backup software. All of these products but one require some kind of setup and restore process. The only setup Rebit requires is to plug in a USB cable; no installation, configuration, scheduling or managing is needed. In other words, plug it in and forget it.

Rebit backs up everything on your C drive: the OS, applications, and data. It is tightly integrated with Windows and has a very intuitive Explorer-like drag-and-drop recovery interface; other products have proprietary user interfaces. Rebit uses continuous data protection technology to back up all changes and even provides bare-metal recovery to restore everything from a particular point in time. Rebit routinely purges old files from the disk, so there's always room for new data.

The next edition of Rebit, which should be out this month or next, adds lots of useful features, such as data migration to another PC, file deduplication and Vista support, and partitions so that two PCs can use the same Rebit backup disk. Prices start at $169 for an 80GB disk and climb to $269 for a 500GB model.

I am quite excited about Rebit. If you are in the market for a backup solution, head over to the Rebit site and see what you think.