The CMS ABSplus is a backup system for notebooks that reduces some of the hassles of keeping data on notebooks secureâ€"at least relatively secure.
If you were going to set out to make life difficult for an IT manager, you'd probably want to put a whole lot of confidential and critical company data somewhere that could be easily lost, stolen, broken, or carried out the building. To make it worse, it should be somewhere that's almost impossible to back up data from. Sound like a nightmare? Try the average executive's notebook.
The ABSplus is basically a hard drive that plugs directly into your notebook's PC Card slot. Provided you've got Windows 98 or later, the OS will automatically detect the drive and install drivers. After that, you can access it almost immediately after you plug it in.
Once it's plugged in, you can install the ABSplus Backup client directly from the drive. This is a reasonably flexible piece of software that allows you to create multiple backup sets. For instance, you could set it to backup your most recent documents every time the drive is plugged in. On the other hand, if you have files that only change occasionally, you can set it to backup every other week, or on the 15th of each month, for example. The vendor tells us that the next release of software will allow you to tag certain files so that they're backed up as soon as they change.
As with all backups, the first time is the longest. Our initial backup of an entire notebook took about 41 minutes to back up 2.5GB of data. However, subsequent backups are much faster. The backup client scans through the files to see what's changed, and only backs up the modified files. This took less than a minute for the average day's worth of files.
One of the clever things about the ABSplus is that you can set up multiple backup folders, and then use a single unit to back up several notebooks. (You're limited only by the amount of space taken up by the backup files, but keep in mind that the data is not compressed.) This is a little more fiddly than setting up a simple backup regime for one computer, but IT managers will find it well worth the effort.
The ABSplus comes with a disaster recovery floppy disk, so if the notebook's hard disk is completely wiped, you can boot from the floppy and restore directly from the backup unit.
The unit we tested had 10GB of storage, but there are also 20, 30, 40, and 60GB units available with PC Card, USB 2.0, and FireWire interfaces. The USB and FireWire versions are also available for Mac OS.
| Product: | CMS ABSPlus |
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| Price: | AU$715 (10GB), AU$902(20GB), AU$1027(30GB), AU$1551 (40GB) AU$2068(60GB) |
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| Vendor: | Elantra |
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| Phone: | (02) 9328 5808 |
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| Web: | www.elantra.com.au |
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| Interoperability: |
Works well with most versions of Windows |
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| Futureproofing: |
Plenty of capacity for several notebooks in a single unit. |
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| ROI: |
You'd only need it to work once to be worthwhile. |
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| Service: |
3-year RTB warranty. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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6%
1%
