I received my new Rebit 5 device, a charmingly slim, black 500 GB portable hard drive, on March 21st. (There was a time when Rebit wanted  to get away from selling hardware, but that idea seems to have fallen by the wayside.)

The first time I tested a Rebit drive, the software was pre-installed on the drive. Also the second time. And the third time, with the SaveMe drive I got for my mother. The CD included in the package was only for emergency restores.

This time the CD was identical to the CDs distributed for  software-only sales, though a sticker on the package says “Use ONLY for complete PC disk recovery.” (The CD itself says “Installation and PC recovery disk.)

I did notice that the drive sent to me for review purposes (FTC disclosure: that means I got it free) must have been made before Rebit changed its logo from the original graceful frog to a squat, comic frog that appears to be a stylized version of the letter R.

I’ve noticed an abrupt price decrease in Rebit drives, which may partly be a function of the continuously falling cost of storage. The cost of a 1TB external Rebit drive, $99, is pretty much in line with the cost of other 1 TB external hard drives. Back when I bought my mother her SaveMe drive (you know, the one she doesn’t use because it doesn’t fit on the table), it cost about twice what a non-Rebit drive of the same capacity would  have.

It’s not as though installing and configuring Rebit has become enormously complex, however. Even though the program didn’t auto-launch, it was pretty clear what to do after I found start.exe on the Rebit drive. (That colorful stuff you see behind the gray square is my wallpaper, courtesy  of a new app called Silk.)

Once the software is installed, it prompts you to choose a backup location. One nice feature: the same program can back up to both local and network drives. I started out by backing up to the 500 GB USB drive, but when later that week I got a new NAS drive (more on that in my next reminder), I added it as a second backup location. If I have both drives connected, Rebit will update my backups on both of them.

Rebit also asks which drives to back up. My very first Rebit drive was confused by the fact that my then-computer had two internal drives. This Rebit isn’t troubled in the least by the fact that Auset’s drive is partitioned into a C and D drive, and it would even back up attached USB drives if I asked it to. (It would have a little trouble fitting the contents of 1.5 TB Qualora onto the 500 GB Rebit drive, however, so I stuck with C and  D.) Rebit does back up the C (system) drive by default.

Next Rebit tells you what you can expect as the backup progresses, including a key to the different progress symbols and a warning that your initial backup could take several hours.

And we’re off!

I started backing up my 500 GB internal drive (partitioned, as I said, into a C (system) and D (data) drive) late in the afternoon on Monday. By the time I went to bed it was 46% finished backing up drive D. When I woke up, it was 45.5% finished backing up drive C.

So it’s not breaking any speed records, but I was using the computer all of Monday afternoon while the backup was running. (During the remainder of the backup of drive C on Tuesday, I used my netbook for e-mail.) And by comparison with that very first Rebit drive I ever tested, it’s gotten a lot faster.  It took less than 24 hours to get everything backed up.

Once I got the go-ahead, I decided to browse my Rebit backup in Windows Explorer. This shows up as a separate entry from the drive’s contents. (You can store things besides a Rebit backup on the drive you use as your backup destination, as long as there’s enough room for your backup.) What you see looks like the “My Computer” view in Windows—except the folders are green. If you hover over a file, Rebit will tell you how many versions are backed up.  In fact, if you hover over a document anywhere in Windows Explorer, it will tell you how many versions Rebit 5 has backed up. And if you right-click on an item, you’ll see the Rebit icon in the context menu, with an option to restore the item, or browse in Rebit 5.

I decided to investigate a few more of the features and possibilities, so I clicked the “Make Recovery Point” button. Rebit does this once a day anyway, but you can do it at a specific time if you want, say before installing a software upgrade.

I noticed a note about recovery points in the Rebit help files:

The recovery point did take a while to complete, but nothing like as long a time as the  first backup, and I didn’t notice any problems with AVG.

I also took a look in the settings, which you can find by clicking that gear-shaped button in the lower right corner of the program screen. This is where I was able to add the NAS drive as a backup location—once I had mapped it to a drive letter. Other options include password-protecting your backups and creating a recovery disk in case you lose the one that shipped with your Rebit.

Having negotiated all of this successfully with my main laptop, I determined to try it with my netbook, as well. But since I was planning to back up to the NAS drive and not the new USB drive, I needed a way to install the software that didn’t require a CD.

As it happened, copying the contents of the CD onto a USB stick and using that to install the software on the netbook worked like a charm. The Rebit 5 drives come with a 3-PC license, so there was no problem about activating the software.  The license key printed on the back of the quick start card might be something you want to back up, though.

Backing up the netbook was fairly speedy, though in both cases the network backup was slower than the USB backup. This is not surprising given that I don’t have a gigabit network, though my NAS drive is designed to connect to one. The Rebit 5 can use USB 3, the new super-fast USB standard, but that’s so new that neither of my computers has it. (eSATA might have been a better choice for the present, but USB 3 will probably take off in the next few years.)

Since then, Rebit has run quietly in the background and not caused any troubles or perceptible slow-downs of  any kind. It’s possible to pause the backups if for some reason you need to—like, say, you’re recording a Skype conversation onto your hard drive and running a continuous backup program at the same time has a good chance of eating up all your memory.  I’ve noticed that even when the backup is complete, the USB drive doesn’t want to be removed unless I have all my Windows Explorer windows closed, which can be a bit annoying.

All in all, I think Rebit 5 is a great product, and I intend to leave it running—not something I do with many of the backup programs I test. It’s a little more complex than at its inception, but it also seems to be better at what it does.

I have also, through the good offices of Marilyn Kroner, found myself in possession of two spare CDs with  Rebit 5 software on them—both for 3PC licenses. Since I only own two PCs and I can’t imagine the Ur-Guru using Rebit, it therefore falls to me to give these CDs away. I just have to devise an appropriate set of rules, which I’ll announce in another post and on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Yes, a brand new holiday in honor of backup. And if you go to http://www.worldbackupday.net/ you can enter to win backup-related prizes from SpiderOak, Backblaze, MiMedia, and CrashPlan. We’ve covered some of those services here on this blog and hope to get to the others before too much time passes.

It seems like only yesterday that I was writing my review of Dmailer’s online backup service. It was actually almost a year ago. That was long enough, apparently, to convince the folks at Dmailer to get out of the crowded online backup market. They’re handing their online service over to YuuWaa.

I haven’t mentioned YuuWaa before, but they have been around for a while; they’re on my list of companies whose pitches I haven’t gotten to responding to yet. Their claim to fame is flash drives plus—in this case, plus online storage, though their other plus is file sharing.

Users of the Dmailer software will be able to back up to YuuWaa through Dmailer by logging out of Dmailer and setting up a YuuWaa account, but will have to transfer their data themselves.

Joel Maki at Zetta has been sending me pitches for about a million years. The problem is, Zetta provides enterprise storage services, which isn’t want most of my readers are looking for.

Most recently, however, he sent a copy of the report Zetta VP Products Chris Schinn gave at the November 2010 Cloud Expo. There are some useful statistics about the growth of data and storage needs, incidence of data loss, and the like, that I thought readers might be interested in.

Download (PDF, 370.41KB)

Zetta is pitching cloud-based sync and replicate as the wave of the future—with versioning to prevent replicating those dreadful “Oops!” moments when you manage to destroy the project you’ve spent weeks working on. This is not so different (in fact, you’d have to talk to representatives of the two companies to know precisely how different it actually is) from the Continuous Data Protection first  advertised by LiveVault in their Backup Trauma Institute video in 2005. LiveVault has since been acquired by Iron Mountain, which is also offering cloud-based backup.

Enterprise services like these definitely have their advantages over tape and disk-to-tape, but I have the same doubts I did in 2005, for the same reason: we have terrible broadband infrastructure in this country. Retrieving a few lost files, or searching them, is certainly going to be easier with cloud-based backups than with tapes. And you have protection against fire, theft, and natural disaster. But are you really going to be able to restore terabytes, perhaps even petabytes of data via a network connection?

Schinn’s report suggests that in the event of a disaster, a company can simply “fail over” to the cloud-based files instead of actually restoring them. This is an interesting proposition and would certainly allow employees whose office had, say, been flattened in an earthquake or washed out in a tsunami, to continue to work remotely from anywhere they could get a connection. (Possibly not so easy to do following said earthquake and tsunami, as we’ve recently discovered.) Mounting storage is a bit different from mirroring the web server and mail server, but not all companies keep those on site, anyway, so chances are decent those machines are in a secure data center at a different location.

There are types of data I don’t back up online for security reasons, yet I find transfer speeds and possible outages a much greater deterrent to converting all my backup to a service like Zetta’s. For one thing, it’s not very logical for me to be unwilling to back up my Quicken data online when I file my taxes online and do my banking and most of my shopping online, and for another, serious security breaches involving financial and other institutions almost always involve the physical theft of physical backup tapes.

But infrastructure bottlenecks are a real issue. In most parts of the United States, small businesses and consumers alike have one choice for cable Internet and one choice for DSL. According to NetIndex, California has an average consumer download speed of 10.91 Mbps, and an upload speed of 2.24 Mbps. (Speedtest.net gives me a download score of 16.67 Mbps and an upload score of 4.21 Mbps, a bit above average.) Compare that to the Netherlands, where the average download speed is 23.51 Mbps. The average. The Ur-guru has Internet in excess of 100 Mbps downstream.

If I follow the math correctly (see Wikipedia on why the math of bits and bytes is never simple), a megabit is 1/8 of a megabyte. So if you had an 8 Mbps connection, you could move one MB (megabyte) per second through it. My connection is about 16 Mbps, so I can download 2 MB per second.

I have about 274 GB of data and software on this computer right now. That’s 274,000 MB. If I had to download that over my current connection, it would take 38 hours and change. (That’s assuming I actually maintained that download speed, and let me tell you, nothing I download ever downloads that fast. Official download speeds and actual download speeds are not the same thing.) A day and a half for the contents of one laptop.

If I had to upload all that…well, I wouldn’t. This is why some cloud storage companies, including Amazon S3, give you the option to make your first backup by sending a physical drive. (It’s not clear from Zetta’s website whether they do something like this.)

So until we have considerably faster upload speeds available to us, I don’t think the enterprise has really come to the end of backups, even though we might be moving from a disk-to-disk-to-tape model to a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model. Which does, I have to admit, sound like an improvement.

Last week Ivan Misner asked me to add some features to the BNI Podcast website, namely the Digg Digg  and the Translate This Button plugins. Installing plugins is a simple enough task, as anyone who works with WordPress knows. Configuring them, however, can take some time. I determined that a horizontal layout was best for the Digg Digg sharing buttons given the fact that they showed up right under the podcast player. The translator is normally meant to live in a widget; to put it elsewhere, one needs to edit the theme files. Again, this was a fairly painless process.

But it was getting late and I was getting sloppy, and I didn’t do what I usually do, which was to make a copy of the unedited files before changing them. In the case of the page templates for the blog index, single post, and “static” pages, that didn’t matter: I got it right the first time and what I did was simple enough that I remembered all the steps and could have undone it. I still don’t recommend that, however, because after doing all of that successfully, I overstepped myself.

I was just checking that everything I’d done looked right on the site when I noticed that the photo of Dr. Misner on the “About” page wasn’t aligned correctly. And, in fact, when I tried to align the photo to the left of the text, it worked in the visual editor, but didn’t display properly on the public-facing page. “Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder whether Brady forgot to code the image alignments into the theme.”

So I went and took a look at the stylesheet. This is a text file full of CSS code that tells browsers where to put images and design elements and what colors and fonts to use when they render web pages.

And here’s where I made my big mistake.

A few months ago BNI launched a huge re-branding effort and there was a minor site re-design with a new logo, header and menu style. I wasn’t the one to do that work; the copy of the stylesheet I had on my computer was actually from the previous redesign.

And I forgot to look at the dates on the files and download the new one to work on before adding the code for image alignments  and captions. That’s an embarrassing n00b mistake. I should actually have downloaded a full copy of the theme files as soon as the new design was up there, but I didn’t. I can’t even say that I thought I’d done it. I didn’t think about it at all.

So I added the new CSS code to the old file, uploaded it to the server, and overwrote the stylesheet that told WordPress where to find the new header and how to display the new menu.

Oops.

I would have been in very serious trouble if Brady hadn’t had a local copy of the CSS file that I had just obliterated. This time I saved a backup copy of it with a different name before adding the code for the images.

Here’s what I should have done, and indeed what I normally do:

 

Image via Wikipedia

1. Downloaded the complete theme files that were on the server and saved them in a folder called <theme name>-<last edit date>.
2. Compared that date with files I already had on my computer, and also, if necessary, compared the contents of those files. Renamed my local copy of the theme to <theme name>-<last edit date>
3. Created a new set of theme files to edit, either by downloading them again, or by copying them locally. (Most WP theme files aren’t large and don’t take long to download, unless they have both a lot of custom page templates and a lot of images. This one doesn’t.)
4. After the work was finished and the files uploaded, renamed the working folder to <theme name>-<current date>.
5. Backed all those files up in my next set of local backups.

This is a manual method of doing what software developers know as version control or revision control. Real programmers use version control software like Subversion to handle this kind of thing for them, particularly if they’re working in groups on the same project.

That seems to me like overkill for websites, where the code tends to change only once in a while rather than undergoing continuous development. But it would probably be a good idea for me to start backing up the site’s theme files on a more regular basis. (The content of the BNI Podcast site changes much more frequently; I get weekly backups of the database that stores that e-mailed to me, and I already have local backups of the audio files.)

Whether you’re dealing  with CSS or Microsoft Word, it never hurts to save a copy of the original document before you start messing around with it. There are times when the “Undo” function can’t help you.