Review of the 3X Remote Backup Appliance

The headline of the pitch I received back in November read “3X Systems Launches Private Backup Cloud Appliance for SMBs”. The notion of a “private cloud” intrigued me, so I decided to follow up. (Besides, no one quoted in the press release used the word “excited,” so they get extra points.)

We all talk about “the cloud” as if it’s some amorphous collective up in the sky somewhere, but none of these “cloud computing” services actually operates among the cumulus and cumulonimbus. Your data is not floating around among the raindrops or waiting to crystallize as snowflakes. All it means to use cloud services is that instead of installing the software on servers in your office building, it’s on servers in someone else’s data center, and you access it through the Internet. Cloud storage puts your data onto disks in a similar data center (or more than one, for redundancy), instead of on a backup drive in your office.

With most cloud services, you rent rather than owning—though with companies like Google making so much available for free, consumers may forget that there are costs involved, the same way they seem to forget that there’s actual hardware involved.

With the 3X Remote Backup Appliance, you become your own online backup service.

Now, if you were geeky enough, you could find a way to do this without a special device. Personally, I’m not geeky enough. And I’m pretty geeky, relative to most people I know. So I think the 3X RBA is a great idea for three reasons.

1. The biggest disadvantage of online backup is the slow speed of data transfer over the Internet. Because the 3X makes its initial full (or “seed”) backup over the local network, it’s much faster than typical online backup services. (How long did it take me to upload my 2 GB backup to MozyHome Free the first time? 12 hours? And that over a cable connection.)
2. Many businesses—and even individuals—want to be sure of just who has access to their proprietary or confidential data. Running your own online backup service, with only your own company’s data on it, gives you complete control.
3. If you have half a dozen or more computers to back up, the monthly or yearly cost of most online backup services is going to start to add up pretty quickly. Many of them charge per computer rather than by the amount of data backed up.

So I arranged to get a product demo and an interview with 3X CEO Alan Arman and some of the team, and also to get an evaluation unit to check out. The demo was very straightforward: it certainly looked easy enough to use. But things are often a bit different in real-life situations. I wanted to see whether the 3X would really be as easy to set up and operate as it seemed to be. (After all, the CloudPlug was harder than it appeared.)

The evaluation unit arrived on January 20^th—the same day as my mother’s SaveMe drive. I was surprised at the size of the box. Based on the photos I’d seen, I was expecting something more the size of my Buffalo Quattro. This box was square and flat.

When I got home, I found out why. The 3X comes in two form factors: the cube, for desktop use, and the 1U rackmount model. Guess which was in that box.

“They sent you a what?” the Ur-Guru said. “Didn’t you go batty from the 40x40mm fans in a rack model!?”

To be fair, Richard Keggans at 3X offered to ship me a cube version instead when I told him about the mistake, but once he assured me that I could still use the rackmount model without a rack, it didn’t seem worth replacing it when I was only going to be using it for a few hours anyway. (The PR spokesperson, who has perhaps never been in a server room, said “We didn’t think it would make a difference to you.” Ha. I think he just wanted to be sure they’d get their $2500 device back.)

Anyway, for anyone else who’s never been in a server room—it’s not so much that the fan noise is loud. It’s not actually louder than, say, my space heater, which is also an electric fan. I did not really need to warn the neighbors to run for their earplugs before powering the thing up.

It’s just that there’s something about the quality of the noise that causes instant brain death. You can tell immediately why people lock these things in cages behind heavy doors inside secure buildings miles away from where they do their actual work. Even the Ur-Guru doesn’t work with rack-mounted systems, because the noise would be too much even for him if he had them in his home office.

So if I were a real customer, I would have bought the cube model, which Richard says is “almost silent.” And it probably is, too, because it isn’t being stored less than an inch from some equally hot device above and below it. The Buffalo Quattro, which has more hardware (though less software) in it, makes very little noise. (Interestingly, the two draw the same amount of power.)

Installation

Even given the awkwardness of having the wrong version of the device, it was easy to set up the 3X. (The printout of the Quick Start Guide was helpful, too.) Plug in the power cable, connect the Ethernet cable to your router, and turn the monster on. Then insert the memory stick with the 3X admin software into your computer and let it run. Then reboot your computer, and start up the 3X Systems Admin tool again. Your device should automatically appear; just select it and choose “Launch Manager.”

That takes you to the web interface, where you do all the sophisticated stuff, including downloading the client software so you can back up individual computers to the device.

The critical thing at this juncture is to set up port forwarding—something I don’t think I’ve talked about since I reviewed ION Backup. I obviously hadn’t done anything with it since then, because I still had that port set up to forward. (Oops.) It took me a while to find the right screen in my router admin, but eventually I found what I needed, and it only took a minute to set it up after that.

There’s a connectivity check feature in the web manager tool for the 3X, so you can check to make sure that it’s possible to reach your device from outside your local network. This is important if you’re going to actually use it for its intended purpose as an online backup device. (And if you aren’t, why are you paying so much money?)

I then downloaded the client and set it up on my netbook. This worked pretty much the same as installing any other backup software. Once it’s installed, however, you have to get a key from the administrator (provided in the backup manager, above) and then the administrator has to approve you. The administrator can also create backup sets and set quotas for client computers.

I’d read some of the instructions for creating backup sets while waiting for Enna to reboot after the initial 3X admin tools install, so I figured I was all set to define my backup set and go. I did run into one small issue, however: when I clicked “Edit” under the “Backup Sets” tab, the top of the window ran off my 1024 x 600 netbook screen.

I was still able to create a backup set that would copy everything on the C:\ drive except for the Recycler, System Volume Information, Windows folder, and Program Files. When I eliminated those, I was left with 9 GB of data, and the 3X copied them quickly (if loudly) while I had lunch.

I’m not really in a position to test the deduplication and some of the other features of the 3X, but deduplication is the reason you can back up several computers to a 100 GB drive. All enterprise systems rely on it these days, but almost no SOHO systems offer this level of dedupe. (And if you have people sending e-mail attachments to others in your company, you’re racking up duplicate files fast, never mind duplicate software installations.)

So I’ll leave those to another reviewer and just say that my “seed” backup went smoothly. It was time to test the remote backup.

Remote Backup and Restore

The normal way to use a 3X is to disconnect it from the local network when the seed backups are complete and move it to another location—the business owner’s home, a different office, or even a cage rented in a data center. Then you plug it in and hook it up to the Internet, and the client computers will back up incrementally according to their schedules. Because only the changes are backed up, this doesn’t take much bandwidth or time.

I don’t have an alternate office location, much less a pocket data center, so I took my computer elsewhere instead. I headed over to the local public library to see whether I could back up and restore data using their free wi-fi connection.

I didn’t have so much luck backing up. I’m not sure why, but the program just seemed to sit around endlessly calculating the size of the backup. (Not very large: I had downloaded a whole two image files so there would actually be some changes to back up.) This might have had something to do with the very slow wi-fi connection, or it might just be that the backup client has to scan the entire machine before running. My battery and patience were running low, so I aborted the backup and tried a restore, instead. The main thing, in my mind, was to confirm that I could connect to the 3X from outside my network.

Clicking the “Restore” button gave me the option to restore one file or several. I then had the chance to browse to my chosen file and to select which backup I wanted to restore from. (I’d only made one, but had earlier opted to save 10 backups.) In order to be sure the restoration had worked, I restored it to a different directory.

And work it did. It took a little longer than I might have expected for a file of modest size, but I don’t think that was the fault of the 3X. That wi-fi connection was really slow. Not quite shades-of-dial-up slow, but I am reminded of the early days of the Web and the expression “Graybar land.”

So the verdict is: it works. You really can become your own online backup service provider. To make it work, of course, you need a place to set the 3X up. If you’re like me and work out of your home, you might need to make an arrangement with a colleague to each keep the other’s remote backup appliance. But the ideal customer is not the home office user, but the person who runs a small office with multiple computers—enough of them that paying for Mozy Pro for a year would more than cover the cost of buying one of these.

And now that that’s done, I can shut it off and hear myself think again.

PS In the week between the time I wrote this and the time I published it, 3X was named one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors by Computer Reseller News.

My mother has attracted quite a following on Picasa since acquiring her D90 in 2008. She takes pictures everywhere: the grocery store, the airport, the hospital, the back alleys, the freeways, the kitchen, the dog park… She’s also started to fill up the hard drive on her much-abused Sony Vaio laptop now that she shoots in RAW (which Nikon calls NEF) format.

Despite a growing facility with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, my mother doesn’t really know that much about computers. But boy, can she create data. (And I taught her how to rip CDs when she was here over Christmas, so it’s only going to get worse.) That puts her into the same category as many of today’s digital camera enthusiasts, who are happily accumulating terabytes of photos and videos of their children and grandchildren but fall into the “I’m supposed to back up my computer?” category on my poll.

On top of that, Mom has two active kittens and a Border Collie. (Describing a Border Collie as “active” would be an understatement.) The cats are known to do things like jump into her lap just as she’s lifting the coffee cup over the keyboard, with predictable results. The dog slobbers on the screen, though I don’t think he’s actually tried to chew it. So not only is there a lot of data, but it’s constantly under threat.

In other words, this woman seriously needs a backup. Something comprehensive, but simple. Something that works automatically. And something big enough for all those raw image files.

So I wrote to Marilyn Kroner and said “My mom needs a Rebit.” (I last wrote about Rebit’s “ridiculously simple” backup devices in May 2009.) And, as luck would have it, Rebit was just about to introduce its new SaveMe drive.

Since Rebit already gave me one free device and this wasn’t even for me, I handed over my credit card info and bought one, but opted to check it out before sending it on to Mom, to see what’s changed since last May.

First, the name. I love it. Why didn’t someone think of it before? “Save me.” That’s exactly what you want your backups to do.

Second, the actual drive is a bit smaller and slimmer than the model I have, but just as heavy. It’s very solid metal. You shouldn’t drop it anyway, but be especially sure not to drop it on your foot.

The CD in the package is not for installation, but for rescue in case of complete system failure. All you need to install the drive is the fold-out booklet with the license key. Plug the drive into a wall outlet, connect it to a USB port, turn it on, and wait for Windows to ask you what to do next. (If for some reason you don’t get an AutoPlay prompt, find the Rebit drive in Windows Explorer and click on “Start.exe”.)

The first thing you’ll see is the license agreement. Once you get that out of the way, the next step is to enter your license key:

This takes you to the welcome screen.

Even as you’re reading that, the software on the drive takes over and starts backing you up. The first time takes a while. The larger your hard drive, the longer it will take. I had to tell it not to back up my second internal drive (right click on the little frog icon in the system tray and click “More” to find this option) in order to save time, since I’m only backing up my own machine for purposes of this review. If you have a large hard drive, you may need to let it run overnight.

You don’t have to tell SaveMe what to copy, because it copies everything.

If you hover your pointer over the frog icon, Rebit updates you on its progress. “Rebit SaveMe is copying data. Backing up drive C:\. 519 files remaining.” Clicking on the box brings up the Help file.

The backup and restore process work the same way as with earlier Rebit models: as long as the drive is connected, it will back up files whenever they’re changed. To restore individual files, just click the frog on your desktop, navigate to the file’s location, and drag it back to your computer. (You can also find the backed-up versions of a file that you didn’t delete by right-clicking on the file in Windows Explorer and selecting “Rebit SaveMe” from the list of options.)

Drive Recovery

As for full hard disk recovery (for which they’ve provided a recovery CD), the Help file warns:

Note: If your computer is rendered unusable through loss or damage, you may be able to recover to an identical replacement computer using the procedure below. The replacement computer must be identical to the original in every respect, except the main disk drive which must be of equal or greater capacity than the original disk drive. Any other differences can cause recovery to fail because of inconsistencies between the hardware and restored software. In addition, certain security features, such as fingerprint readers, may prevent successful recovery. If you cannot replace the old computer with an identical one, or if security features interfere with recovery, [Rebit] recommends that you instead restore only your data files to the new computer without attempting to recover the entire system.

This is not a Rebit issue, but a Windows issue, or rather a PC hardware issue: there are too many variants to be sure that everything will work if your hardware isn’t identical. Macs all have identical hardware, or very nearly, so they don’t have to worry about that. If your hard drive melts down or your operating system screws up, having a complete drive image including your software will save you a lot of time and trouble. But if you lose your two-year-old machine to a fire or flood and replace it with a new model, your chances of being able to restore the complete drive image aren’t good.

Extra Storage

Anyway, back to the SaveMe and what’s new with it. The difference between SaveMe and Rebit’s previous drive—at least, the one that made it seem appropriate for Mom’s photo storage needs—is that in addition to backing up the current contents of your drive (and saving copies of things you’ve deleted), SaveMe can act as a storage device, the way ordinary hard drives do.

To test this, I navigated to the Rebit in Windows Explorer (it’s Drive G just at the moment) and created a folder called “Media Storage.” Then I dragged a couple of test items over: a video, a photo. It was just like copying them onto any other disk, and I could play the video and audio files from the SaveMe drive.

Of course, as the help files warn you, the SaveMe software isn’t making backups of files you store in it’s “regular disk” area, only of the files that are on your hard drive. And as I’ve warned readers more than once, if you only have one copy, it’s not backed up, whether or not that copy is on your hard drive. So if you take advantage of the large capacity of the bigger SaveMe drives for storing photos or videos, remember to keep backups of them somewhere else, unless you really don’t care if you lose them.

And now it’s time to uninstall the SaveMe drive from my computer, remove all my data by resetting the drive (it prompts you to do this when you uninstall), repack it, and send it off to Mom.

Rebit sells itself on ease of use, but the most inescapable characteristic of this “ridiculously simple” backup device for Windows is cuteness. How can even the most technophobic Windows user feel threatened by that cute little frog? And look at the announcements you get if you’re a backup blogger or tech columnist: “Rebit to Donate to SavetheFrogs.com. […] Rebit will celebrate international “Save the Frogs” day on Tuesday, April 28th by donating $10 from each purchase at its online store to the international “Save the Frogs” campaign. Purchasers will receive a commemorative wristband. We also have an additional savings offer for April 28^th on the Rebit Facebook page in hopes that Rebit will be able to make a hefty donation to save the frogs.”

But back to saving your data. I said last week that I was going to talk about attempts to make Windows backups as simple as Mac backups, and Rebit definitely sets out to do that. This was true back when I reviewed the earlier, one-PC version of the product in 2007, and it’s still true today. Plug it in, turn it on, connect it to your PC, and enter the product key when prompted.

Long-time readers may remember that all did not go smoothly in my first experiments with the Rebit. It was, in fact, the slowest backup I had ever experienced. (That was before my first encounter with Memeo.) Backing up my 80 GB C drive took 20 hours, and the best efforts of the tech support team couldn’t figure out why that should be the case. Worse for me was the fact that the recovery CD got confused by the fact that I have two separate physical drives in this machine.

In the approximately 18 months since then, the Rebit team has not been slacking off. The new 1 TB, 5-PC model they sent me represents a substantial improvement over the original device. (It’s bigger, of course, but a fairly standard size for an external drive, being only slightly longer than a typical 3.5” drive enclosure.) First, speed. I started by connecting it to my netbook. I started with Mena because I figured she was least likely to have problems, being only a few months old with only one backup program installed so far, and not too much on her hard drive. The likelihood of the kind of conflicts that have interfered with testing on Enna seemed small.

It took less than 5 minutes to set up. As soon as I connected the Rebit, a prompt came up inviting me to install Rebit. Once I entered the product key from the back of the Quick Start Guide, I got a friendly screen welcoming me to Rebit and a pop-up notification from the system tray indicating the progress of the backup.

This was when I first saw the “Rebit light.” The power light on the Rebit is a primary-color blue a few shades darker than your standard computer LED, but the activity light is an equally bright green: not the pale green of the Rebit’s packaging or logo, but a pure, color-circle green. Both the green light and the little frog icon in the system tray flash when the Rebit is copying files from your computer. If you hover over the flashing frog, it will tell you how many files still remain to be backed up, and then says “Teach me how to use Rebit.”

If you click on it, it takes you to the Rebit support page, where there’s a useful Technical FAQ and some contact info. To get to the detailed help file, right-click on the frog and select “help” from the menu. It might seem, after all that emphasis on simplicity, that you wouldn’t need instructions in the Rebit’s use. The Rebit backs up everything on your drive, and all partitions of your drive, so there’s nothing to configure. You don’t really need lessons on how to back up with Rebit, but you’re going to have questions about how to get your data back when it comes time to restore it.

But I was speaking of speed.

The Rebit backed up both partitions of Mena’s (admittedly nearly empty) 160 GB drive in the time it took me to shower. I live in California. Even if I didn’t care about the environment, it’s too expensive to take long showers. That was fast.

I thought I’d try next on Astarte, the aging Dell I’d finally reclaimed from my housemate when she got her own laptop. But Star’s one USB port is shot, and the PS2-to-USB adapter, which works fine for my wireless mouse, doesn’t work for the Rebit. So no go there, unfortunately; it’s NAS backups for Star.

I tried the Rebit on my housemate’s new computer, for good measure. Unlike my machines, which are all one flavor or another of XP, hers runs Vista. Except for that extra annoying “enter your administrator password” step, setting the Rebit up was just as easy. Backing up the machine (too new to have much on its drive) took a couple of hours.

And then, the moment of truth: how would the Rebit get on with Enna? Awkwardly, at the first go; things kept freezing up, so I uninstalled it. But the second attempt, started one afternoon when I was using Star to work, went much better. It took somewhere between 6 and 8 hours to back up both Enna’s internal hard drives (80 GB apiece, both nearly full), but the backup completed successfully. That’s certainly an improvement over 20 hours to back up just the C drive.

There’s still something about Enna that the Rebit doesn’t like, or something else on Enna that doesn’t like the Rebit. I keep getting errors where Windows Explorer shuts down, usually when I’m in the middle of copying files. And also—even more vexingly—problems with Windows Live Writer, though it has so far (knock wood) not frozen up while I’ve been typing this post. Too many different backup programs that have locked file support, I bet. That’s gotten me in trouble in the past. Too much stuff running in the background. Too many fragments of old programs littering the registry. I have got to reinstall this machine, or none of the hardware or software manufacturers are going to want to speak to me. Just because I can’t find anything in the Event Viewer doesn’t meant nothing is happening.

So, Speaking of Restoring Data…

Once you’ve installed your Rebit and backed up a machine or two, you’ll notice a new entry under “My Computer” in Windows Explorer—at least if you can get Windows Explorer to stay open. There under your internal and external drives and your control panel, you’ll see another cute little frog icon, predictably labeled “My Rebit.” Expand the icon and you can see every machine that’s been backed up onto your Rebit. If you click on one of the folders, you see a list of files on a froggy background.

This Rebit explorer doesn’t work quite like Windows Explorer, as you’ll notice if you right-click on any of the items. You can explore, open, and copy—but not delete. Once a file is backed up to the Rebit, it stays there until Rebit’s “Neverfull” technology decides that the oldest versions of every backed up file have to be deleted in order to make room. The only way to take files off a Rebit is to remove the whole PC, which means deleting the entire backup and starting over. (If you want to take that drastic step, right-click the frog icon, choose “More” from the menu, and then select “Remove a PC.”)

You can also drag and drop, which is probably the easiest way to restore individual files from the Rebit to your computer—or to a different one of your connected computers, for that matter, since you can browse all the backups from any computer unless you decide to password-protect them. Rebit duplicates your computer’s file structure exactly, so if you know where the file you want to retrieve used to live, you won’t have any trouble finding it. (If you’re not sure where the file was stored, you can search for it, the same way you do in Windows Explorer.)

If you’re exploring your C:\ drive and want to check out which versions of a file you’ve backed up, just right-click on the file. You’ll see the frog again, next to an entry that says “My Rebit.” If you click on that entry, you’ll see the date and time the file was last backed up and the option to browse the file in My Rebit, which will show you every version of the file it has.

At least, it will do this if 1) you have the Rebit drive connected at the time and 2) your computer isn’t fighting Rebit with all it has. I think in my case the problem is Mozy, which integrates with Windows Explorer in a very similar way, as you can see from the screenshot above. Last night when I went to test the Rebit Explorer so I could write about it, Windows Explorer froze up so spectacularly that I had to restart the machine, at which point I gave up and decided I would make more progress by connecting the Rebit to Mena.

Which I did, until this morning when the Rebit demanded an activation key, something it does after 30 days have passed. (That information is buried in the help files.) I pressed the button to generate one, and it allegedly worked (“Activate software” is no longer an option on the “More” menu), but the Rebit is not backing up. Something to be sorted out with the support staff, clearly. Curiously, when I connect the Rebit to Enna, it starts backing up immediately.

Simplicity Score

The Rebit scores very highly in the categories of ease of use and user-friendliness. I have complete confidence that my mother could use it with no problems, at least for ongoing backups and individual file restorations. It also comes with built-in prompts to connect it: warnings from the system tray, and little chirping noises from the drive itself.

As for the excitement of testing the complete bare-metal restore from the CD to see whether the improved Rebit can now handle my dual-drive laptop, that will have to wait for my overdue reinstall. Which will be very soon. Really.

I’m dying to see how Seagate’s new Replica stands up to the Rebit. (Seagate, are you listening?) It’s a sleek-looking device designed with exactly the same purpose in mind. It could turn out to be equally effective. It definitely won’t be anywhere near as cute.

If you’d like to buy one of these charming devices (for which I get no kickback at all), hop on over to the Rebit website. I don’t think I can recommend it for Mozy users, though.

I did actually have a plan for what to write about this week. Two plans, even, depending on whether the VIA ARTiGO A2000 I’m supposed to be reviewing arrived. But the ARTiGO has yet to show up, and while I’ve taken a quick look at the demo and downloaded some of the sales docs for Hosted FTP, I haven’t had a chance to examine it properly. (And we won’t even go into the argument I lost with my CD drive…)

Those of you who follow the blog rather than reading the e-zine version of the Backup Reminder—which is most of you, by the stats—know that I bookmark a lot of backup-related articles in Delicious. (Which used to be del.icio.us, until Yahoo! bought them.) I don’t include these in the e-zines, because I know enough of the subscribers personally to be pretty sure you wouldn’t be that interested in a collection of headlines and links. Delicious is very handy, and I’ve written about it here before, but I mostly use it for bookmarking, not as a social network or for any other purpose.

Yesterday, however, I discovered that people can send you bookmarks within the Delicious system, because one of my fans had done so. I didn’t know I had fans until one of them sent me a bookmark. The fan was “CommVault”, and the bookmark was a New York Times story mentioning CommVault. Well, fair enough, it was relevant. My two other fans are “seagatetechnology” (wonder what business they’re in, eh?) and “Wordworker”—a fellow writer and naming consultant whom I taught to blog. I much suspect that the reason I’m being followed on Delicious.com by people in the backup industry is that I’m posting the bookmarks here on the blog—and “backup” is one of my top 10 tags, along with “podcasting.” If people start sending me links, then I’ll have even more backup tags, and even more potential blog posts—and even less time to write them, no doubt.

I also got a reader question this week, which is great—but I wasn’t able to answer it, so I’d like to post it here in the hope that someone reading this will be able to help out. Is anyone out there using Dmailer Backup? Is anyone from Dmailer reading this blog? Here’s the question, corrected for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, because I am a Natural Born Pedant and my day job is writing and editing:

Currently I have a Western Digital Passport. It came with Dmailer Sync installed. That is very nice; it works great. However…I want a backup of my data, NOT a synced copy. Meaning, if I copy a file from my PC to the Passport, then delete that file from my PC, the file should remain on the Passport. This is NOT what Dmailer sync does; it deletes the file from the passport. So I would like to use Dmailer Backup, which as far as I can tell does what I want: keeps all files on the Passport. My question is…is Dmailer Backup something that you would recommend? Is there an alternative? To switch, can I just delete the Sync and install Backup?

I’ve never actually used Dmailer myself—perhaps because Western Digital has been less generous than certain other companies with its drives, though actually the Ur-Guru has bought a good half-dozen of those little WD drives and I don’t think any of them came with Dmailer.

My colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia uses both Dmailer Sync and Dmailer Backup, but when I asked him for a review, he was up to the eyeballs in work on his PhD and couldn’t write one. I suggested that the person who asked the question contact Lee, who could probably answer the “Is it worth buying this thing?” question quickly enough by e-mail, but it did seem like it would be a good idea to add reviews of the Dmailer products to this blog.

With my backlog of backup hardware and software to write about, however, what I’d really like is for someone who’s already using Dmailer to send me a guest column (that’s sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com).

I do want to point out to everyone, however, that if you delete a file from your PC (or Mac!) and then have only the copy on your external hard drive, it’s not a backup. While it’s by no means necessary to go into backup overkill mode the way I have (see last week’s backup diagram), a single copy of a file cannot, by definition, be a backup. I’m all for clearing out your computer’s C drive to keep it running smoothly, but make another copy of those files you’re removing if they’re important to you.

And I really would like to hear from ‘Professor’ Hopkins, when he has time, about the way he uses Dmailer Sync to keep his data synchronized across multiple computers, even though that’s not strictly backup if file deletions are replicated in real time. (Gosh, Sallie, could you make that sound more techie?) I’m planning to get myself a netbook soon, so I have a vested interest in the answer.

By next week I should have either the HostedFTP.com review or the ARTiGO A2000 review for you. There’s also a review of Memeo for Mac in the works (from a Mac user, natch). And maybe we’ll hear more about Dmailer. Plus I have a client who wants to know about the latest in drive imaging—any recommendations?

Whether or not you have any hot new hardware or software, back up.

No, I was not sleeping off Thanksgiving overindulgence instead of writing this backup reminder on Friday morning. I was just absorbed in completing my delayed-and-necessary reinstall before heading to work. I thought a late reminder would be better than none, and now that I’m finished with all but those last little tweaks that drag on for a week or two, I can pass on the backup-related lessons I’ve learned as a result of this adventure.

1. Set Aside at Least 3 Days

I realize that for many of my readers, reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling your operating system falls into the “Kids, don’t try this at home” category. But even those who leave these things to someone else should be aware of just how time-consuming and tedious a job it is.

It took me most of one day to make a list of the software I’d need to put back on the machine when I was finished, make sure I had the most recent versions of Audacity, Firefox, Skype, Karen’s Replicator, and all the other freeware programs I use regularly, download all the most recent drivers from HP (the manufacturer of my computer), Epson (the manufacturer of my printer and scanner), and Wacom (the manufacturer of my pen tablet)—and, of course, to back up all my data in as many ways as I could think of. If you’re a computer owner preparing to have someone else reinstall your machine, you may be able to do this part yourself and save some money.

The second day was devoted to reformatting the C drive and reinstalling Windows XP Pro. A full format on an 80-GB drive takes about 40 minutes, with about 40 minutes more to install Windows. Except I ended up doing it twice, because the first time around I forgot to delete the restore partition that CompUSA had put onto the drive and which I’d failed to notice and eliminate during my last install. (I’m one of those people who thinks putting your system restore onto the same drive as your system makes no sense. Think about it a bit.)

But even if I hadn’t had to do the formatting twice, there are all those Windows updates to download, many of them requiring restarts. And then there are the drivers. Without the correct display driver, for instance, everything on my widescreen laptop looks weirdly stretched out.

Once all the updates were finished and the drivers installed, I had to make a Ghost image so I wouldn’t need to do that part over if something went wrong later on.

I also got quite a bit of the software installed on the second day, but not all of it. That put the main focus of the third day onto restoring my data–once I’d made a Ghost image of the installed programs.

Copying documents back onto the C drive was straightforward enough, though it takes a bit of time. Other things have to go back into specific places: the settings for Replicator, for instance, or my Outlook data file. (And I discovered that if I also copy my Outlook Extend.dat file along with the .pst file, Outlook magically remembers all my rules and other settings.) I’m still finding little details of program options that I need to set—that’s part of the ongoing tweaking.

The other part of the third day I spent re-configuring backups, in the course of which I made some other discoveries.

2. Don’t Get a Rebit if You Have Multiple Internal Drives

I understand from the Rebit people that they’re working on this issue, but while I’d known Rebit would only back up my C drive, I hadn’t realized that the presence of two internal drives would cause their bare-metal recovery option to fail.

Since I was about to reinstall the machine anyway, I figured I had nothing at all to lose by testing Rebit‘s PC Recovery CD. So I inserted the CD and rebooted my machine, which brought me into a friendly-looking non-Windows interface designed to lead me through what they call a bare-metal restore. (That means it restores your operating system and software as well as your data.)

Unfortunately, it didn’t lead me very far, because it couldn’t tell which of my internal drives was which. They are the same make and size, so I probably couldn’t tell which was which if you put them in front of me, but there are ways for other programs to tell them apart, because one is set as the “master” drive and one as the “slave” drive. (The operating system goes on the “master” drive, which is Drive0, and if you try to put it anywhere else, you’ll have no end of trouble.)

I imagine that Rebit’s engineers will be able to fix this problem fairly easily. Not that many laptops have two internal drives, so it’s possible none of their users have run into the problem before. But meanwhile, I can’t use their restore CD.

3. Some (Backup) Programs Won’t Recognize Your Computer after a Reinstall

I had suspected that Rebit might not recognize my newly-reinstalled computer as the same one it had been protecting before, since the log information it had installed before was now gone, along with any recognition signals that go into the registry. (The registry is where Windows keeps all the really important information about how to operate. Don’t mess with it. Especially don’t mess with it without backing up your whole system first.) And, indeed, when I connected the Rebit, it offered to start protecting my computer. (I said no, not having enough time right then for it to go through that lengthy initial backup sequence.)

What I hadn’t expected was problems with Mozy, the free online backup service I use. While I could log into Mozy and see or restore my previous backups, creating a new backup set was a problem. I didn’t really want to create a new backup set at all, but to use the old one, but Mozy isn’t set up to recognize that even I wouldn’t have two computers named “Enheduanna.” Instead of adding new files to the existing backup, it wanted to create an entirely new backup from scratch. (I only discovered this because I kept getting “over quota” warnings that didn’t make sense when I did the math on the files in the folders I wanted backed up.) I ended up deleting the old Mozy backup file and starting over—which means that my slow initial Mozy backup is still running. (Though I trust the current prediction of 1 week and 4 days to back up 2 GB is only a product of wildly fluctuating upload speeds, and not an accurate estimate.)

4. Some Drive Problems are Beyond Baffling

More or less immediately after reinstalling Windows, I ran Chkdsk to see whether the reformat had cured my drive problems. The answer: apparently not, as Chkdsk thinks I have 4 KB in bad sectors. This despite the fact that I haven’t seen any other sign of drive errors–or not in the C drive, anyway. (I’ve had some error messages relating to controllers and other problems with my external drives, which may be a matter of their built-in software not being entirely compatible; I’m not sure and need to investigate further.)

A geek friend let me use his copy of SpinRite, a handy tool meant to find and fix problems like bad sectors. It has a good reputation, and my erstwhile colleagues at Kickstartnews.com like it. Since I wasn’t feeling well enough to actually do anything with my computer yesterday afternoon, I put the CD in as soon as I’d finished the data transfer and made my final (for this reinstall) Ghost image.

Nine hours and six minutes later, SpinRite woke me out of a sound sleep to tell me it had finished. I looked over its graphical display of all the sectors on my C drive (SpinRite had no trouble at all telling which drive was which, but prompted me to choose the correct drive to test). Every single one was the nice blue color that indicated it had passed the test and was fine. Not one was marked “recovered,” much less “defective” or “unrecovered.” In other words, my drive is fine. (And it didn’t even get all that hot while spinning continuously for 9 hours.)

So what did I find when I started Windows again (at a more civilized hour of the morning) and ran Chkdsk again? I still have 4 K in bad sectors. Except they seem to be illusionary bad sectors. The Ur-Guru is just as baffled as I am, but says that any serious problems with either the drive or the electronics that control it should have shown up in the course of that 9 hours. So maybe I can ignore Chkdsk’s 4K.

On the other hand, maybe there really is a strange and subtle problem with my drive. So I have to be even more diligent about creating Ghost images and file backups than usual.