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(More customer reviews)I recently switched back to Windows 7 for my primary computer after 4 years on Mac OS, and was looking for something similar to Apple's "Time Machine" backup software--one that would back up files continuously and reliably with minimal need for user intervention.
I'm no newbie to backups; as early as 1993 I was using QIC (quarter-inch cassettes) tapes to do whole-computer backups; when I last used Windows on my "main" computer I had a system based on Windows' Scheduler feature to do nightly backups onto a hard drive using Windows XP Pro's built-in backup software (ntbackup). It worked but it was still a bit of a hassle, so coming back to Windows I really wanted to find a simple solution.
The first solution I tried was Genie9 TimeLine. It did pretty much what I wanted (full system backups on a continuous basis), but performance seemed poor. Specifically after reconnecting my laptop to the backup drive after being disconnected overnight (the backup drive being situated at my office at work), TimeLine seemed to churn away on the backup drive for hours as it tried to "catch up" with the fairly few changes that had occurred overnight.
I then looked to Altaro Oops!Backup, but quickly learned that it only backs up user data, not the whole system, so "disaster recovery" is not possible. Anyone who's spent days setting up Windows and applications just the way they want knows this is a non-starter.
Now I've come to Rebit SaveMe Express. I had read horror stories about the initial backup taking days, but hooked up to a USB 2.0 external drive, the initial backup of the 250GB or so of contents on my laptop took about 4 hours. "Incremental" continuous backups seem fairly quick and even after being away overnight, SaveMe has "caught up" fairly quickly. The software seems designed to be as unobtrusive as possible and I've noticed that it goes into a slower "stealthy" mode when I interact with the computer, to avoid creating any slowdown in performance of apps I'm using. If I turn away from the computer for a few seconds I hear SaveMe start writing to the backup drive at a faster pace.
The software is extremely simple and easy-to-use. You install it, point it at the backup drive you want to use, the drives you want to backup, and that's it, it will start backing up everything. There are very few options and settings you can change. For example I would have liked the ability to exclude certain directories (temporary files) and file types (virtual machine drive files) but SaveMe pretty much just backs up everything. I saw a posting on Rebit's support forum about SaveMe does not back up temporary directories (e.g. C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\Temp) but I have not found that to be the case. At least it does it fairly quickly.
I haven't used the restore function much but it seems straightforward; you browse the backup like you would browse a folder in Windows. You can select a file and view its history and choose to restore a version from a certain point in time, including files that have since been deleted.
In summary, so far I'm pretty happy with Rebit SaveMe Express and though it's not perfect, it's the best backup solution I've found for the price.
One quick tip: a little-advertised fact is that Rebit's software is available for a free 30-day trial period. Go to Rebit.com's support forums and look for the "latest version" discussion thread, where you'll find download links for Rebit's software.
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