Nandak7 - I purchased the Rebyte system last month off Ebay, also purchased a IBM netvista N40 off of ebay. I spent around 250 bucks for everything. I threw a couple of 20 GB hard drives in there I had lying around.
So far so good I did have an problem when I created a user account call "admin" which caused a cascade of issues. They do need some more formal internal procedures or directions to stop new users from making these types of errors stupid but damaging errors. These issues have all been resolved promptly with help from the rebyte staff however. In most cases the rebyte staff accessed my PC (I opened a port for them to enter) and fixed it for me.
I've set up several share accounts on my primary computer and now rebyte checks them every hour for changes and backs them up automatically. Sort of like the set it and forget easy back rotissery you see on TV. It is important to note this won't help you if your PC hards drive fails, it is only intented to back up your shared drives and act as a file server.
The best thing is now I store any documents on the raid-1 server sitting in my basement. I don't store anything on my PC except for the software. Once I get my 3 120 gb hard drives I have 240 gbs of usable network space that is in a raid 5 configuration.
Remote access: I'm in grad school, frequently I work on my papers on 1 of 3 PC's, my laptop, my desktop and my desktop at work (don't tell my boss). How do I manage working on one copy of my paper? Keep it on Rebyte, access it remotely from work or when I'm travelling. If I want to access it securely I can by just typing in
Rebyte also automatically updates my IP address (my provider hands out dynamic addresses) to its servers. So if my internet provider changes my IP address tonight, when I go to work tomorrow I can still get in. All I do is type in
I don't have to worry about when my IP address will expire, rebyte takes care of that for me.
Those videos:
I frequently take videos of my kids. Small snippets but typically larger than 5gb. Ever try and email 5gb, most providers won't allow it. Go over 10 and your out of luck. No problem with rebyte give your friends the read-only guest sign on and they can download as big a file as they want!
I LOVE IT!! I consider a few other options but for 250 dollars (would have been less had I already had an old unused PC hanging around) how can you beat it really? Where else can you find something that allows for secure access, raid configurations, remote access, and dynamic dns updating (I use their dynamic dns updating to remotely access a networked printer I have too). If my parents want to keep a backup of a critical file no problem just put it on my 250 dollar server! I spend another 200-250 for bigger hard drives and I done for a while.
