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Rebit 500 Rebit 500 : Angle

Rebit 500

Rebit 500

Think of the Rebit 500 ($220 list) external desktop-class hard drive as a security blanket for your Windows PC. It continuously backs up all your files, down to those needed to boot your PC. If anything harmful (physically or information-wise) happens to your computer's internal hard drive, then the Rebit will be able to help you restore it. There are a few caveats, but for the many users who run a Windows version and drive format that the Rebit software supports it does the same job as Apple's Time Machine on the Mac: It keeps a copy of your hard drive in safe, local storage.

The Rebit 500 looks like a run-of-the-mill external desktop hard drive—one with a power supply and a large case. As its name suggests, it can hold up to 500GB of data (there's also a 320GB version), and it's designed to back up any Windows 32-bit PC with a 500GB or smaller capacity. Rebit sells its software separately, so you can create a larger Rebit drive with your own hard drive. That said, the Rebit 500 doesn't require any setup of the drive, though you will have to do some setup on the PC you want to back up.

When you attach the hard drive's USB cable to the PC, the Rebit software auto-installs. Once installed, it remains active, but it performs its backups only when your PC is idle, so you shouldn't see any degradation in performance with most modern PCs. I connected the system to my Windows XP test-bed PC, which has a FAT32-formatted C: drive. (When considering the Rebit 500's compatibility with your system, it's important to keep in mind that new PCs are NTFS, but many older PCs—the ones that need backup the most—can be either FAT32 or NTFS.) Unfortunately, the Rebit balked at the FAT32 drive, and I needed to switch test beds. When I tried the Rebit on a 64-bit Vista gaming PC, that system wouldn't back up, because the Rebit software is 32-bit-compatible only. This is a major problem, since most of the PCs I review these days are 64-bit Vista systems. Finally, I connected the device to my Windows XP laptop with its NTFS-formatted C: drive, and the Rebit drive was able to set itself up and start doing its job.

The drive took about an hour to back up the 50+GB of data on my laptop, but subsequent backups were continuous and invisible. (I added some files to the C: drive, and saw the Rebit grab them a few minutes later). The Rebit 500 will continue to keep old versions of files until the drive fills up, so it works just the way Time Machine d

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