It works great for backing up a small hard drives less than 35 GB. I really liked my Rev External Drive, so I even bought the Iomega company stocks: lots of them. Then I found out, it does not work well for backing up a bigger hard drive. Since I do video editing, I got several big hard drives, which are bigger than 100 GB. There are several problems for backing up an over 100 GB hard drive. First it is slow: several times slower than a USB external hard drive: about one hour for 30 GB. Second, it is cumbersome to switch the 35GB disks several times to back up a 100 GB hard drive. Every time, I have to wait the slow 35GB disks to fill up to switch it. Finally, its back up software does not handle well the switching 35 GB disks. Sometime it fails. So, I have to do it all over again: driving me nuts.

However, I think it has great potentials to be the killer back up solution for a video editing and digital movies. If Iomega increases the driver back up speed, and releases a bigger 100 GB rev-disk. Then, I will recommend it for everyone who owns a digital camcorder, or likes to download movies. I hope some day every digital camcorder owner, or digital movie fan also owns a Rev backup solution. So, I can profit from my Iomega stocks.

This drive is marketed by Iomega as primarily an archival solution, but it is also great as a kind of floppy drive for the 21st Century (a super Zip drive). The hardware is faultless - a massive improvement on the deeply flawed Peerless drive - and the Iomega REV disks seem robust: I send one overseas though the mail once a week, have it returned the following week, and so far without any reliability problems.

However, it is as a backup solution that I purchased my Rev drive and in this context the whole is let down by the supplied backup software. Iomega's Rev-enabled versions of Backup Pro and Ghost just don't make the grade for serious backups. I soon gave up trying to make sense of Backup Pro and getting it to work consistently. Instead, I bought a copy of Dantz Retrospect 6.5 Professional, for about $90. Now, I make perfect daily backups.

For the cost of this drive, why doesn't Iomega bundle a copy (perhaps limited) of Retrospect?

After reviewing the product on this web site, I finally took the plunge. I couldn't be happier. I have my entire hard drive imaged and have Automatic Backup Pro updating hourly. I haven't had a decent backup system since Adaptec 4 which doesn't support Windows XP. This worked with Iomega's USB CDR. Since I now have a new computer and a wonderful backup system; I should be good to go for some time. In case of disaster, I can recover in a short time. As a Tax Preparer, this is of major importance in the months to come......

The drive is fast, efficiant, reliable, and once saved my life because I'd backed up a whole hard drive of a laptop on to it - a laptop which then got left by an open window during a sudden downpour. I've tried a whole host of backup solutions over the years, this is the only one that allows you to take an image of an entire hard drive in about 35 minutes (15 GB of data: my last solution took nearly four hours to do this) and store it somewhere safe, for a rainy day.

When I first unpacked this , I was amazed to see just how compact it was. The software loaded without a hitch and I was up and running. This is a dream come true. It backs up my data as fast if not faster than my old external drive. I bought this because on my job we switched from our old Zip 250 to these, so I needed this at home for work, but wow It does so much more. I loaded all my sons pc games onto it so I could free up the pc's internal drive and they work just as well. I just pop out his disk and place in mine when I need to work. I love it, Thanks Iomega for a great device.