External hard disks are always useful for making back-up copies of important files and documents.

However, one hard disk is very much like another, and it’s often the software that is supplied with the hard disk that sets one product apart from another. That’s very much the case with the ABSPlus from CMS Products.

Priced at £117.50, the package consists of a 60GB hard disk – a compact, portable device that is designed primarily for use with notebooks – and a backup program called Bounceback Professional (there are other models available, up to 160Gb at a cost of £210).

The focus here is very much on the Bounceback software, but there’s not even a printed manual that explains how to install the hard disk to make use of the backup function. When we asked CMS about this they simply said: “it’s plug and play”. That may be true, but a printed manual would still be useful – especially given the complexity of the Bounceback software.

Bounceback is certainly a very powerful program. As well as allowing users to back up individual files and folders, it can also perform what it calls a system backup, which allows the user to copy his or her PC’s complete Windows installation onto the hard disk, so that you can start the PC using the external hard disk instead, in case anything ever goes wrong with the computer's main hard disk.

There are a number of other useful options, such as the ability to synchronise files between two different computers – perhaps the PC at work and another one at home – so that both computers always have the same sets of files. Unfortunately, the lack of a printed manual makes it difficult to understand how all these options work, and the online help files built into Bounceback are so long and badly laid out that we found them quite annoying.

The ABSPlus and its Bounceback software certainly work well, but the complexity of the software and the lack of a proper manual mean that it will be hard going for home users who aren’t familiar with the technicalities of backup software.

Vista compatible: Yes