Rebit 5 review

Making a backup of a computer system is a conceptually simple task. It involves making a copy of everything on your computer’s hard disk and keeping this as up to date as possible, perhaps with a little compression, while ideally allowing you to skip back to a more secure and stable point in your computer’s history. Should the worst happen and your computer can no longer start, it’s also useful to have a rescue boot disk that allows you to access your backed-up applications and data and restore them to your PC. Backup software is no good if it’s not set up correctly, though. Rebit 5 addresses this problem by removing the user as much as possible from the backup process.

ReBit 5 doesn’t so much lead you through the potentially complex process of configuring your backup as reduce the process to the absolute bare essentials and give you precious little control over those. While this approach may not suit everyone, many computer users will be glad not to have to deal with the nitty-gritty of computer backup, particularly when the plummeting price of storage makes regular full system backups more attractive.

Rebit’s interface is simplicity itself

When you first run it, Rebit 5 prompts you to select a drive or drives to back up. The C drive is selected as the default and locked backup option, and you can’t deselect it. File system support is limited to NTFS, so Linux and FAT32 partitions will not appear – however, if your laptop has a protected partition containing driver and OS installation data (often in place of a Windows disk and a driver disk) this will be detected and, as on our test system, also selected and locked.

Rather than making backups according to a schedule or triggered by certain actions like software installation or system shutdown, Rebit works in the background continuously, backing up files as they are altered as long as the specified backup device is attached. Typically this will be an external USB hard disk or a network-attached drive. If the drive is ever disconnected, Rebit will simply catch up when you reconnect it. The backup process doesn’t seem to hamper computer performance unduly, but the full initial disk image is processor- and disk-intensive, so you’re best off running it overnight. The Rebit icon in the system tray will inform you when your files are at risk and could use a fresh backup. You can also rotate between backup disks, so you can always keep one safely off-site.

While such continuous backup is undoubtedly useful, it is also one offered by other more comprehensive backup applications like Acronis True Image Home, which provides many more customisation options and allows you freer reign over the type and timing of backups.

Your system disk is locked and has to be part of the backup

As well as keeping a continuous backup of your files, Rebit also makes incremental recovery points every 24 hours as long as the destination drive is attached. These can be used for a full system recovery should disaster strike. The backup archive is a mirror of the protected drives, and you can browse them and restore individual files and folders simply by dragging and dropping. Version control is also elegantly dealt with, with all the versions for each file accessible immediately when you select the file in the archive. You can also perform a full system restore to your existing or a new hard disk, but more intricate backup and restore routines, like application restore and application setting restore functions, are absent.

The beauty of Rebit 5 is its simplicity. If you just want a reliable and non-intrusive backup, it’s an excellent choice. However, the inability to neither adjust encryption, compression or create custom schedules for your complete backups, nor switch between differential or incremental backup routines, will serve as a handicap for some. If you don’t need too much custom control over your backups, though, it’s a good choice.