Seagate's Replica: Highly praised foolproof backup drive and software

[mouser]

Just came across this on Tom's Hardware site -- they really love it and say it's the first foolproof backup solution they've come across.  Might be the perfect gift for a loved one in your life who needs some backup intervention.

Seagate’s Replica is a portable hard drive with automatic backup, versioning, and disaster recovery features to make backup a no-brainer. The product works so well that it deserves our rare Best of Tom’s Award.

Looks like its from $130 to $180 in price: http://www.seagate.com/replica/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-backup-recovery,2450.html

[f0dder]

Too bad the design is so ugly; I'd prefer something square & stackable, preferably black as well - form factor being more important than color, though. USB2 is probably also limiting, even if the drive used is 2.5" its likely able to do more than 32MB/s (where do tomshardware get that figure from, anyway? While you're not going to reach full theoretical speed, USB2 is 480mbit/s or 60MB/s).

ReBit sounds like a pretty nice solution. Haven't read extensively on the details, but it sounds somewhat like apple's TimeMachine or Genie-soft's timeline? I think I'd prefer something that didn't make the data partition invisible, and relied on regular folders and hardlinks (akin to rsnapshot)... but hiding the partition is probably a smart move for non-techie end-users.

[Deozaan]

If I were to go for this, I'd probably just buy a license to the ReBit software ($49 for a single computer, $79 for multiple PC license).

The 250GB or 500GB SeaGate drive isn't going to be able to do a full backup/restore of my PC, which has over 1TB of storage inside.

Too bad the design is so ugly; I'd prefer something square & stackable, preferably black as well - form factor being more important than color, though.

Buying just the software would solve that problem as well.

[pencoe]

even if the drive used is 2.5" its likely able to do more than 32MB/s (where do tomshardware get that figure from, anyway? While you're not going to reach full theoretical speed, USB2 is 480mbit/s or 60MB/s).

The theoretical maximum given in the standard is 49.152.000 Byte/s (Isochronous Mode) or 53.248.000 Byte/s (Bulk-Mode) (from Wikipedia), in reallity you will see no more than 40 MB/s. This given 32 MB/s seems to be very well for me... 

Bye, Peter

[Lutz_]

Current Rebit "save me" prices seem to have gotten cheaper than mentioned above:
$29.95 and $39.95 . Looks very interesting.

http://www.rebit.com/products.html

[tomos]

Current Rebit "save me" prices seem to have gotten cheaper than mentioned above:
$29.95 and $39.95 . Looks very interesting.

http://www.rebit.com/products.html

does sound great - would be nice if they gave some more info though - fairly minimal info on their site

[housetier]

I wonder if the admin at work might want to use replica. The other day we found out the backup solution didn't backup at all because one of the disks couldn't spin up. Naturally said solution also opted not to report such an issue...

And then management has to clear the funds, and the assistant admin has to go shopping. All in all, we might have a working backup solution by christmas! 

[Lutz_]

The main drawback is, that the program only backs up a single hard drive - the system disk.  At least it should be good for notebooks. 

Current Rebit "save me" prices seem to have gotten cheaper than mentioned above:
$29.95 and $39.95 . Looks very interesting.

http://www.rebit.com/products.html

does sound great - would be nice if they gave some more info though - fairly minimal info on their site