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.

When I first heard about Memeo Instant Backup, I objected that no program that backed up your entire hard drive could possibly be “instant.” Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger, so copying them takes longer and longer.

Robert Phillips explained to me that the “instant” part refers to the fact that the backup process starts instantly: as soon as you install the product, it begins backing you up. You don’t have to tell Instant Backup anything except where you want it to put your files. It’s designed to be easy enough for your grandparents to use, and the author of the press release tried it on hers to make sure.

I was expecting something designed to compete with Rebit, but that’s not quite what I got. Memeo Instant Backup is simple, yes. It’s got a colorful, friendly user interface, and it gets right down to work. It even works pretty quickly, and after the initial backup, its continuous monitoring doesn’t put too much drain on the system. But it’s got a little truth in advertising problem that you need to know about.

The reason I was expecting a software version of Rebit was this statement: “Protect your entire computer instantly. All files on your C drive will be included in the backup plan.” As I found out after running Memeo Instant Backup, this is simply not true. Let’s walk through it and see if you can spot what’s missing.

One minor but early irritation was the inability to choose which directory to install the program to, but that’s because I’m a “power user” type. The people this product is aimed at don’t care about things like that, if they even know they’re an option. There are very few options available in Memeo Instant Backup, but that’s a deliberate move to avoid confusing the user. In essence, there are two things you can do: back up everything, or restore everything. Oh, and you can pause a backup while it’s running if you need to, say, move or rename a file you just downloaded.

The interface is attractive and easy to understand. An illustration of a computer monitor shows the relative proportions of the different kinds of data you have on your machine, while a progress bar shows how much of the available space on your backup device is occupied.

(In case you’re wondering, I chose the new Metro drive from Buffalo as the backup destination.)

Those colorful icons and the size of the completed backup should be your first hint that Memeo Instant Backup is not really backing up the entire C drive. Enna is a fairly old laptop, so my C drive is only 80 GB, though I have a second 80 GB drive built in, as well. Right now my C drive is about half full: I’ve used 40.2 GB. The size of that backup is 15.4 GB.

What’s missing? The obvious answer is “program files.” Memeo refers specifically to documents, pictures, music, videos, and “others.” If you look at the actual backup destination folder, that’s even more explicit. Instant Backup avoids operating system folders and default program installation folders, so the “Program Files” and “Windows” directories are conspicuous by their absence, are many of the subfolders from “Documents and Settings.”

Leaving out the system files is fair enough, though I don’t think you can make a truthful claim to back up an entire drive if you skip them. But there’s something else missing here, and it’s a pretty big oversight.

Not one of those folders contains my Outlook PST folder. For the uninitiated, Outlook stores all its data in a folder called Outlook.pst that’s stored in Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. You will notice there is no such folder here. That means that my e-mail, calendar, and contacts are not backed up. (Well, not by Memeo. I am, of course, backing them up.) Maybe the assumption is that everybody’s grandparents use Yahoo! or Gmail or Hotmail.

At least the fact that these files and folders neatly replicate the structure on your C drive means that it’s possible to restore a single file via drag and drop, because you can’t do it through the Memeo Instant Backup restore interface. The only option there is to restore all your files, though you do get the choice of whether to restore them to their original location or an alternative location. Whether you will ever then be able to delete them from that alternative location seems to be an open question.

Memeo Premium Backup lets you restore individual files and has other features that the less expensive Instant Backup lacks. I’ve written about its predecessors before if you’re interested.

Instant Backup seems to do a pretty good job at the things it does. I do think the lack of e-mail backup is a serious drawback for anyone who uses a POP mail client, and that the claim to back up “your entire drive” should be adjusted to something more factual. Nevertheless, I like the program as a tool for technophobes who need to back up their photos, documents, and music. It’s friendly, easy to use, and unobtrusive. It will also probably improve in subsequent versions, the way Memeo’s other products have.

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.

While I’ve got a couple of guest posts promised (both on Mac backups), nothing has yet materialized, so I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the backup news that’s come up in the past week. I bookmark all those stories I find in Google Alerts or hear about from other sources, but I don’t always go back and investigate them further.

If you’re a non-WordPress blogger (heresy!), you’ll want to check out Allen Stern’s “Do You Backup [sic] Your Blog?” post in the InformationWeek Digital Life Weblog. Allen provides links to guides for backing up Drupal, Movable Type, and Blogger, as well as mentioning the WordPress DB-Backup plugin I’ve covered extensively here.

Actually, speaking of WordPress (as I do a lot these days), I went to my first WordPress Meetup in San Francisco last week—and we found ourselves talking about backup, and this blog, and the post on the WordPress Backup plugin by BTE, about which even the experts in the room had not heard. (Well, there are 4,000 registered WordPress plugins.) Everyone there but me was a Mac user, and nearly all of them had some kind of horror story to tell about fried hard drives. Whether or not Macs have superior operating systems, a hard drive is a hard drive, and anything that spins at high speed is at risk. (Like my CD/DVD drive, for instance, but let’s not talk about that.) I hope all their blogs are more backed up as a result of that discussion.

Anyway, back to the news. Peter Kent of the Northern Colorado Business Report is a geek in search of the perfect backup. (I know just how he feels.) Right now he’s using two online backup systems: SugarSync (about which I’m supposed to write, or get someone to write, eventually) and iDrive, in combination with a Rebit—though he’s not actually quite sure that he could restore from the Rebit. I’m glad to know Rebit is hanging in there, though I suspect that a product designed to work for the clueless user is always going to encounter problems with the power user’s modded machine. It’s always a challenge to design a drive-imaging product for Windows, because there are so many possible hardware variations. Macs are a far more controlled environment.

The Technically Personal blog has a list of “Top 10 Websites to Take Backup of Data for FREE!” (a title that says “Non-native speaker of English” to me). Among familiar sites like Mozy, iDrive, MyOtherDrive, and our friends at SpiderOak (featured in the December 12th Backup Reminder), TP lists the less familiar Adrive, SkyDrive (from Windows Live), Humyo, 123-drive, Drive Headquarters, and Orbitfiles. Technically Personal also has a post about free data recovery software for USB sticks, but I’m pretty sure DriveSavers would tell you not to use it.

Finally, I thought I’d see who was giving presentations about backup, so I hopped on over to SlideShare and did a search. I found 2577 presentations available for download. If you want a lesson in the basics of backups, there’s definitely one available for you. In fact, I could probably fill up the blog for weeks just by posting the slideshows, even if I leave out all the ones specific to enterprise environments.

Somehow, though, that feels like cheating. Still, I might pick out a few favorites. Come to think of it, I might see about sharing the presentations I did on backup for NYLF, way back when. They’re only slightly dated; all that’s really changed is the average size of a hard drive.

What never changes is the importance of backing up your data. So what are you waiting for?

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I’d like to wish you a very merry backup. As I did last year at about this time, I want to urge you to give your friends, family, co-workers, employees, clients (check all that apply), and most of all yourself the gift of backups.

Free Online Backup

If you’re strapped for cash, try sitting down with your loved ones and setting up accounts for them on Mozy. Of course, the ones who just got new digital video cameras for Christmas are going to need more than the 2GB of storage that comes with a free account, but for many people, it’s plenty. And it has the advantage that once you’ve set it up, it runs automatically and you don’t have to think about it again unless you use up your storage quota or need to retrieve a file. (There are other online backup services, and I’ll mention some of them next week, but Mozy is the one I have the most experience with.)

Bear in mind that the first backup with any online service will take several hours, and it’s definitely not suitable for people with dial-up connections.

Free Backup Software

USB Flash Drives

USB sticks (also known as key drives or thumb drives) are ubiquitous and cheap. They don’t make good long-term storage, but they’re still better than having no second copy of your data at all, and you can easily store them in a safe deposit box away from your office. You can also get them branded with your company logo. Your employees and customers are sure to find them more useful than pens or key chains.

External Hard Drives

Capacities are going up and prices are coming down. Large-capacity external drives make good gifts for people who take thousands of digital photos, have massive music collections, and make videos of every event in their children’s lives. (For these people you might even want something that acts as a media server.) All those things can take up a lot of space.

If the intended recipient travels a lot, one of the smaller external drives like the Western Digital Passport, Maxtor OneTouch Mini, or Seagate FreeAgent Go is probably a better choice. The Ur-guru has a good half-dozen of the Passports, all in shiny (fingerprint-attracting) black. I’ve got one each of the Seagate and Maxtor drives. All of them come with backup software pre-installed.

Rebit

If you have technophobes with new laptops on your list, it could be worth investing in a Rebit. They’re pricier than ordinary external hard drives, but they’re very simple and they run continuously in the background without noticeably hindering performance. And they’re cute. Like the online services, though, Rebit takes a long time to create the initial backup.

Network Drives

If you have multiple computers in one home or office, a network drive may be the way to go. I’ve written extensively about my Maxtor Shared Storage II (also pictured above–it’s the one that looks like a cinder block). Other options include the Buffalo Linkstation and Western Digital’s My Book World Edition. The My Book has a little problem with multimedia files, though: it doesn’t want you to upload them to the Internet, even if you made them yourself and own the copyright.

Network drives tend to be on the expensive side, not to mention being a bit large to fit in stockings, but they can be very useful.

Merry Backup to all, and to all a good night.