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.

This is a guest post by Stefan Didak, who tested Mozy 2.0 for Mac back in November on his new iMac and wrote about it in December. And yes, it is February now that I’m posting it, and have no one to blame but myself.

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After downloading Mozy 2.0 for Mac, I installed it on “Boron”, an Apple iMac 27 inch 2.93Ghz Quad Core i7 with 8GB RAM, 1TB HD, HD5750-1GB, and a 2TB Western Digital MyBook Studio FW800 that acts as the Time Machine backup device.

Installation was quick, easy, and took up an estimated 65MB.

After entering your user e-mail address and password you get to sign up for an account or use a product key if you already have one. I had one provided by Mozy for the purposes of testing.

During the first time configuration you will be asked whether to use the MozyHome’s key or your personal key for encryption purposes [5]. Mozy will encrypt your data with a 448-bit key to keep prying eyes from sniffing around in your data, which can be especially useful if you’re on a public or local Wi-Fi connection that can easily be intercepted and sniffed for packets. (That means capturing your data as you transmit it over the network.)

I created an encryption key of my own and saved it to a safe place because Mozy does not have access to the key so if you misplace it or flake out and forget it you will not be able to restore your files! Make sure you have a backup of your key in more than one place.

After going through the setup and configuration I directed MozyHome to some folders I wanted it to use as the source of the backup.

The main interface (which you hardly ever need to look at because Mozy will do all its work in the background) shows the schedule of the next backup, when the previous backup was made, how many files are selected and how many are going to be backed up on the next scheduled interval. And, of course, how much storage space you are using for all these files.

Mozy allows you to define the backup schedule and how much network bandwidth you will allow it to use (so it won’t interfere with other network traffic).  set the schedule to do its backups every day at 3:30AM and decided not to limit the bandwidth at all since there’s not a lot of network traffic on my internet lines around 3:30AM.

Once Mozy started doing its backup the main dialog for MozyHome can show you that a backup is in progress. It’s unfortunate that MozyHome did not take full advantage of the 20 Mbps upload (upstream) speed on the internet line that the iMac is using. The speed of performing the backup of the selected folders varied greatly ranging anywhere from 2KB/s to 250KB/s but at no point provided a constant speed. There is some CPU usage going on because of the encryption being performed but when looking at the processes involved with the Mozy backup it didn’t seem like those were a bottleneck on a 2.93Ghz Quad Core i7.4.

An earlier version of MozyHome was also tested because this newer version has higher upload speeds. Unfortunately it was difficult to reach a conclusion because of the inconsistent upload speeds and lack of consistency but it does seem that the new version is generally a bit faster. However, on a powerful enough system it does not appear to take much advantage of a 20 Mbps upstream in bandwidth.

Once I had a few GB’s worth of data backed up (and that took a few days, mostly incrementally because the iMac was not powered on 24/7) it was time to try restoring (that is, downloading) some files. Selecting the files and the destination where you want to restore them is about as simple as it gets. And it got the job done even though I did cancel the restore after a while of testing. But again the bandwidth used (out of a 120 Mbps downstream bandwidth) was far below the capacity of the internet line and as you can tell from the screenshot, restoring files peaked at 326KB/s. That’s not bad at all for most users with consumer grade internet lines but quite a lot below the 12-14 MB/s I often get from the 120mbps line.

During a real crisis scenario, the performance may not matter as much getting your precious files back again—or every minute might be costing your business money.

In conclusion, I would recommend a local, high speed, backup, for the Mac, preferably using the included Time Machine and an external hard drive (a FW800 drive is really very spiffy), but that means both your system or laptop and its main backup are in the same physical location. But if you want a secondary backup that’s off-site, easy to configure, requires very little involvement or manual action to get it going, MozyHome does provide what you may need for that purpose. Just don’t expect extremely high speeds and fast backups and restores.

Stefan also forwarded me several Mozy News messages containing helpful tips like this one:

When I first tested the Windows version of Mozy, somewhere around 2007, slow upload time was the major drawbacks I noticed. But that seemed to be an issue with most online backup tools. And everyone knows the so-called high-speed Internet in the United States is a joke compared to what’s available in Asia and in Western Europe.

So I was surprised—particularly given what Todd Esplin said in the interview about greater upload speeds—that a fast Internet connection didn’t result in fast backups. I had some discussions with the Mozy team about this, but they weren’t conclusive. Naturally a process that requires encryption and other kinds of encoding (for versioning, say) is going to be slower than a straightforward FTP transfer. But it doesn’t seem logical that it should be that much slower.

As long as speed is not of the essence—and after that first backup, things do go more quickly—Mozy has a lot going for it. They’ve been around a while, and have EMC behind them. They’ve got a great sense of humor. The software is easy to use. You  can choose your own encryption key. It gets your data off-site, which helps protect you against theft and natural disaster.  And there don’t seem to be that many other options for online backup for Mac, though there are lots of competitors in the Windows market.

If you know of a better tool for backing up your Mac online—and particularly a faster one—write in and let us know. Leave a comment on the blog or send a message to sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

One of the things I like about my new laptop is the eSATA port—even though I don’t have any eSATA external hard drives yet. (I’m sure there’s someone out there who could correct that little oversight.) SATA (Serial ATA) is a faster way to connect your hard drive to your motherboard; most newer computers use it instead of the older EIDE standard. An eSATA port has a speed of 3,000 megabits per second, whereas a USB 2 port only goes 480 Megabits per second, and your normal home network cable will only transfer data at 100 megabits per second. (I wouldn’t worry about that too much, though, because your normal home ISP won’t be sending it to you at more than about 20 megabits per second.)

A computer with a SATA drive inside it will be faster than a computer with an EIDE drive inside it. But what about external drives? My two most recent external drives actually show up in Windows 7 as “USB to SATA Bridge.” That means they’re SATA drives, but I connect them with a USB cable. Theoretically,  I could switch to an eSATA cable—except that the limitation on that speed is cable length, and I couldn’t have a cable that runs 10 feet from my computer stand across my bed to where I work. So I guess I’m stuck with USB anyway.

StarTech has made a device for people who have bare-naked SATA drives—the kind intended for internal use—and want to use them as external drives with their USB-equipped computers, or perhaps to copy information from them when the computer they come from has died of something other than disk failure. This is the $139 (MSRP—you can get it at Amazon for $84.24 with free shipping) USB to SATA Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator Dock.

This is not an industrial-strength device, but one made for home use. (Machines for duplicating hard drives on a large scale are much more expensive, not to mention larger.) It’s compact and very simple to set up. Inside the box you get the dock itself, the power brick, three sets of plugs (U.S., Europe, and U.K.), a USB connector, and a very small instruction booklet. The cord is a little bit short if you’re trying to reach the top of a desk from a floor-level power strip (the power brick ended up dangling in the air), but it was certainly easy to put together.

Windows 7 had no trouble installing the device drivers, in spite of the fact that the package only rated it up to Windows Vista.

The dock isn’t much use without at least one drive in it, of course. One of my geek friends had kindly loaned me an empty 1 TB SATA drive, which I unwrapped and stuck into the “destination” socket of the dock. (It actually doesn’t matter which socket you put the drive in as long as you have the dock connected to the PC and operating in JBOD mode, but I didn’t want to take chances.) You just slot the drive into the socket to connect it, and press the eject button to remove it.

I was briefly puzzled as to why the drive didn’t show up immediately, but then saw the reminder in the booklet that said “The hard drives may need to be partitioned/formatted using a disk management utility before you can access them.” Duh! I knew that. It’s just been a while since I’ve had to do it.

So I popped over to Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Storage | Disk Management and found that it works pretty much the same way as in Windows XP, though I don’t remember this first step:

Since the Hitachi destination disk was only 1 TB and I wouldn’t know what to do with a GPT anyway, I stuck with the default MBR, then moved on to formatting and found that Microsoft had actually instituted a wizard at this stage.

Once that was done, the drive duly showed up in My Computer. (And wonder of wonders, it was possible to assign it the drive letter B!)

I did a quick test of the connection by copying the contents of my downloads folder over to the Hitachi. It seemed to go pretty speedily.

The next order was to test the stand-alone drive duplication. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to do that, but then I remembered that I had four perfectly good SATA drives sitting inside my Buffalo Quattro, and they were designed to be removed in case they needed to be erased. (The Ur-Guru is going to kill me when he reads this, if Jay Pechek, who gave me the Quattro, doesn’t do so first.) And the drives in the Quattro are only 500 GB apiece, so they’re small enough to copy onto the Hitachi.

So I took a screwdriver and removed one of the drives from the Quattro and put it into the “source” socket on the StarTech dock, which I had disconnected from my computer. (Yes, of course I disconnected the Quattro and turned it off first. And yes, there was a little dust in there.) The dock beeped at me, prompting me to hold down the “mode” button until it beeped again and the light turned red to signify that it was now in drive duplication mode.

And off it went. It’s still going: after an hour it had reached the 50% mark. Well, StarTech bills it as a stand-alone hard drive duplicator, not an instantaneous hard drive duplicator. The duplication rate quoted in the product specifications is 72 MB/second, which is much slower than SATA transfer speeds and brings us to an expected duplication time of nearly two hours for a 500 GB drive.

I would honestly have expected the duplication to be faster than the USB interface, since there’s no slowdown from passing the information through a computers’ operating system and none from having to use a slower bus for transport, but I’m obviously missing something. Maybe it’s the something that makes those industrial-strength drive duplicators cost ten times as much as StarTech’s.

The StarTech USB to SATA Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator Dock seems like a handy way to be able to use hard drives in rotation, perhaps keeping one or more off site. Because your drives are going to be somewhat more exposed to dust and other damage just sticking up out of the dock like that, so it’s probably better for drives that you don’t plan to let sit in the dock for long periods, but rather intend to store in nice sealed anti-static bags. If you do any kind of tech support and have to make rescue calls with any kind of frequency, it could be a very handy device to have. If you’re a technophobe who shudders at the thought of formatting a disk, you might as well just buy a traditional external hard drive with an enclosure around it.

If I spend the first several paragraphs apologizing and making excuses for not posting a column since April 2nd (ouch!), I’ll just be adding insult to injury. The Ur-Guru said to blame him, but he’s only been here since April 24th, so that won’t work. I just got caught up in other things—and I only wish all of it had been high-paying client work, which is the kind of excuse I like to be able to make.

Anyway, here at last is the review of Gladinet Cloud Desktop that I promised Jerry Huang ages ago.

The interesting thing about Gladinet is that it lets you back up to multiple cloud storage sites simultaneously. It also maps those sites as “My Gladinet Drive” in Windows Explorer so you can drag and drop from them. Given the awkwardness of reaching some of these services through their own interfaces, that’s a considerable benefit right there.

Once you install the program, there are a couple of screens of settings to configure.

First, enter your license key if you have one. A home-user license for Gladinet Desktop Professional is $39.99 and a commercial license is $59.99. FTC disclosure: Jerry gave me a license key so I could test all the program’s capabilities. Then register with Gladinet. (Give them your name and e-mail address.)

Next, add some storage. I was impressed at the number and variety of possible storage locations, some of which I hadn’t heard of, and some of which I hadn’t known you could use as storage locations. I initially checked Google Docs and Amazon S3, but later signed up for Azure Blob Storage from Microsoft to make it a better test. (And what a nuisance that was—far more trouble than signing up for an Amazon S3 account, let me tell you. And what kind of name is “Blob,” anyway?)

Once you’ve chosen your storage locations, Gladinet will show you your general information and give you the option to change settings such as the drive letter it maps to (I wasn’t using “Y” for anything else, so I left it), whether to encrypt your profile, and so on.

Before you can use the storage options you checked off, you have to provide login credentials. This was not too tricky with Amazon S3, since I’d had to do it with several other programs already and knew where to find the information. It was also fairly simple with Google docs. It was notably confusing with Azure Blob and took several tries before I had the right information in the right place. That’s not Gladinet’s fault, mind you, but a certain lack of clarity on Microsoft’s part. Maybe if you’re a Microsoft developer you understand these things intuitively. If so, I don’t think the Azure Blob service is really meant for anyone else yet. But I digress.

If you use Skype, you might get an error message from Gladinet saying that Port 80 is blocked. Jerry says the easiest way to fix that is to go into your Skype options under “Connection” (in Advanced settings) and uncheck the box that says “Use port 80 and 443 alternatives for incoming connections.”

After setup is complete and you’ve mounted your virtual directories, you have several options. Gladinet installs a fairly sophisticated tool in your system tray/notification area/whatever they call it in Vista and Windows 7, and you can just right-click that to start the Gladinet Cloud Explorer, the Backup Manager, or the Task Manager—or to run backup tasks directly. You can start the Gladinet Management Console from the Start menu, as well, and the Gladinet Quick Launch screen will pop up when you boot your machine unless you do something to make it go away.

There are several options for backup with Gladinet. You can choose to back up all documents, pictures, “musics”, videos, folders, or select specific items. I wanted a relatively quick test, not an exhaustive hours-long marathon with my upstream connection speed as a bottleneck.

As you can see from the screenshot, Gladinet had no trouble seeing my network drives and considered all of them valid sources for backup, though it does warn that backups may not be real-time. Since I wasn’t planning to use it for continuous syncing, I wasn’t worried about that.

If you do choose to back up all your “musics” or videos or document, Gladinet will go through all your drives to index those files. That can be a time-consuming process and slow down your system, so it warns you about that.

In this case, I just opted to back up my FileSlinger™ newsletter directory to all three backup destinations: Amazon S3, Google Docs, and Azure Blob.

I got a prompt from Google Docs asking me whether I wanted to convert my Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents into Google Docs format or leave them as they were, but otherwise the job ran smoothly and quickly.

Once I’d run the backup, it was easy to go into the explorer and confirm that the files had, in fact, been backed up.

Though the interface can be a little tricky (between first testing Gladinet and writing this review I forgot about how a few things worked), the product is versatile and does what it claims to and more than I used it for. (You can schedule backups or use Gladinet for continuous backup.) And, of course, if you don’t want to customize backups, you can use the simpler options and the system tray interface. The hardest thing may well be setting up your cloud storage accounts, as true cloud storage is still much more the province of geeks than online backup is.

Contest

For those who have hung in there in my absence, I have two free licenses of Gladinet Desktop Pro to give away. The two best (meaning most creative and entertaining) answers to the question “Why did Microsoft call its cloud storage Blob?” will win. (The judges are the Ur-Guru and me. Criteria entirely subjective.) Post your answers to the comments. You have as long as I was late to enter.

A couple of weeks ago a representative of Dmailer contacted me with information about their forthcoming, still-under-embargo release of a free version of their software that would also include 2 GB of free online storage. Because I have a bit of editorial backlog on this blog, it was not difficult to keep this news under wraps until after the official March 23rd announcement.

Dmailer is a French company (though the name is pronounced “Dee-mailer,” at least by English-speaking users), and the only person I know who uses their software is my colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia. When I posted a request for someone to write about it, quite some time back, no one responded, and by this time I’d stopped ever expecting to hear anything from Dmailer themselves. But with this push into the crowded online backup market, they clearly want as much coverage as they can get, in as many markets as possible.

Like Mozy, Dmailer gives you 2 GB free online backup. Unlike Mozy, Dmailer also gives you a full-featured offline backup product, Dmailer Backup v3.

There are definitely advantages to being able to use the same software for your online and offline backups. Fewer programs to install and manage. Less space taken up on your hard drive by those programs. Just one interface to get to know. Less likelihood that the two will interfere with one another. And, perhaps the most important for the “set it and forget it” generation (which is most of us, given the option)—no extra steps to take to make sure you have both local and online backups covered, at least not once you’ve signed up for your online backup account.

In theory, anyway.

Installing Dmailer Backup v3 was easy. The user interface is attractive and easy to understand, and leads you through each of the steps, giving you several options along the way.

First, you choose your installation location: “Dmailer Backup must be installed on an external storage drive.” The program recognizes both USB and network storage as well as secondary internal disks. I chose the USB drive with the most available space on it for the test.

Next, Dmailer asks whether you want automatic, continuous backup of certain folders, or to choose what to back up. I chose to customize, but novice users will find that automatic option extremely comforting and convenient.

If you’re customizing your backups, you can do so both by file location and by file type. Personally, I don’t need my desktop backed up (nothing there but a very few shortcuts; I don’t know why people clutter their desktops with folders), but I do want my Outlook data copied. (Note that “e-mail messages” is not an option under “file types”—if you want your e-mail backed up, you have to back up the folder where it gets stored.)

Then there are the Backup Settings. The one to watch out for here is “Live Backup” That means Dmailer runs in the background and backs files up continuously as you change them. For some types of files and some people, this is great. It’s the essence of continuous data protection.

For me, on the other hand, it’s trouble. There are some kinds of files you can’t back up while they’re open, notably Quicken data files and Outlook data files. And then there’s what happens if you’re running a continuous backup program while you’re recording audio or video. The computer overloads and freezes, or at least that’s what happened to me with Memeo Instant Backup. So I turn that feature off, because I can’t count on remembering to turn the backup program off when I need to record something, and I can put a shortcut to the program in the Startup folder so I get a backup whenever I boot my system, which is often enough for me.

Once I’d been through all these options, I saved the backup job and started backing up.

The program works pretty quickly; it copied my 12.7 GB of files over in an hour.

Despite offering versioning and password protection, Dmailer doesn’t use any kind of proprietary format to store your backups, so you can just drag a file back from the backup folder to restore it. Or you can use the restore wizard to restore as many or as few of those files as you want.

The next step after local backup is online backup, but for some reason I ran into trouble here. E
ven though I filled in all the fields, read the EULA and clicked the button to say I had, I kept getting an error when I tried to create an account.

I tried with a different e-mail account; same result. Tried logging in on the website in case the error message was a mistake; no luck. I figured it would take forever to hear back from support, because it’s Easter Weekend.

When I re-started Dmailer a bit later and filled in the product registration information, however, I was suddenly able to create an online account. Maybe that was the missing link, or maybe whatever was glitching got fixed.

Success bred its own problems, however. Dmailer suddenly sucked up all my CPU cycles as it began running the online backup—before I had even configured it. Which was a big oops, since I needed to specify a much smaller subset of folders to back up online in order to stay within that 2 GB limit. But unless you click “Advanced Settings,” Dmailer will use the same backup definitions for your online backup as for your offline backup.

I eventually managed to fight my way through to the settings I wanted, apply them, turn off the “start online backups automatically” option, stop the backup that was in process, and start over again. I then clicked the “Go Online” button to see whether I could remove anything that I hadn’t wanted backed up.

This, fortunately, is perfectly possible. Just click those little blue drop-down arrows and select “Delete” if you want to get rid of something. (You also have the option to download it, so you can restore the file to a computer without the Dmailer software installed, or to share it.)

Upload speeds are not what I’d call record-setting, but they’re certainly no slower than Mozy. It wouldn’t hurt Dmailer to add in an option that let you determine how much of the computer’s resources to dedicate to the backup, however. I know Enna is getting on in years and her RAM and processor aren’t impressive by 2010 standards, but given the length of time any online backup usually takes, it’s a good idea to be able to relegate it to the background and get on with other things, unless you plan to run it overnight.

Minor issues aside, however, Dmailer Online Backup looks like a viable alternative to Mozy Home Free, combined with a solid offline backup tool. Whether it will scale as well as the EMC-owned Mozy remains to be seen, but if you don’t have an online backup solution yet, this is a good place to start.