The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group ABSplus Backup - Review Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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ABSplus is a family of backup drives whose best feature is that the drives are a
no-brainer to use - something essential in a backup regime. I mentioned in a
previous editorial how I lost a drive within 24 hours of knowing that something
was wrong. I said that I do back up to another physical drive daily and
occasionally to an external device or CD-R. What I needed was something like
ABSplus. The packaging is tantalisingly deceptive. I opened the ABSplus box and other than two CD-ROMs, I could barely see two cables shrink-wrapped to the side of the inner box. I was sure the 40 GB backup drive was missing. Wrong! ABSplus is tiny and fits inside my shirt pocket. Connecting it to the PC was as simple as plugging a USB cable into a spare socket. On a PC, the drive takes its power through the USB cable. When using it with a notebook, you may need to use a supplied power cable that requires a second USB socket. |
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BounceBack Professional 6.0
The included backup software is BounceBack Professional 6.0. It certainly does a
great job of backing up my data in the background at scheduled times, but it has
advanced features such as "bootability". This is a disaster recovery solution
that makes the ABSplus drive bootable when placed inside your computer. If you
have a Macintosh, it can boot from the ABSplus drive.
It can also back up a PC over a network and back up several PCs onto their own
partitions on the ABSplus drive. Files are saved in their native format, so you
can access them directly if needed. You can restore individual files,
directories or a complete hard disk.
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In Use
After installing BounceBack Professional and plugging in the drive, all I had to
do was to set up a backup schedule. The software and the drive did its job
perfectly. If you need a backup solution that simply works, this is it.
ABSplus is distributed in Australia by Elantra, who can point you to the nearest
reseller. See http://www.elantra.com.au/.
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Reprinted from the July 2005 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
