Rebit (Rebit, Inc., 2TB $180, www.rebit.com) backup hard drive and recovery software make backing up your PC, files and folders no-brainer easy. Likewise recovery.

Plug the Rebit into a USB port, enter your license key (just to make it legal), and Rebit immediately begins backing up your computer. Backup includes everything: operating system and settings, applications, data files and folders, e-mail, bookmarks, multimedia files and folders. The initial backup takes several hours, but you can continue using your computer.

Once the initial backup is completed Rebit stays active, making backups of every new file that is saved. If you make changes in documents and re-save as you go along, Rebit keeps backups of the previous versions. This feature can save the day if you accidently delete a document or project. You can recover the last saved version or previous versions.

Rebit automatically makes daily backups of system settings to ensure that these are up to date as well. If you have to leave your Rebit behind when traveling, when you return just plug in your Rebit, and it automatically makes backups of any files or folders that have changed since it was last plugged in.

Rebit only backs up your computer’s internal hard drive(s). It will not back up external hard drives or interfere with their function in any way.

A cool feature of the Rebit is that it monitors its own capacity and will never "fill up," as long as the total capacity of the Rebit hard drive is the same or larger than that of your PC’s hard drive. It does this by automatically deleting older versions of backed up information.

You can always tell the backup status of your computer by hovering over the Rebit icon, which will then give you info as to the time of the last file backup. In addition, by hovering over a file name in My Computer, My Documents and the like, you’ll find two lines added to the usual file properties balloon: one indicating the number of versions of that file that have been backed up and the date and time of the last backup.

Disaster recovery is likewise easy. If your computer suffers a hard drive crash, just install a new hard drive and boot the computer with the included Rebit Recovery CD. You can select the point in time you want to restore from (usually the most recent), and it will be restored exactly as it was at that point. The restoration will take several hours. The caveat: if your PC is destroyed or stolen, you can only do a complete restore if your new computer is the same make and model as the old one. You can, however, recover any files and folders to the new PC. You could also use Rebit to transfer files and folders to any PC.

The Rebit is a must have for easy, ease-of-mind backup and recovery. We did notice a modest slowdown in performance in our computer, but think it’s a small price to pay for this ease of mind.