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ABSplus

Mountain Solutions has developed a pocket-sized fully automated backup system. Iain Laskey gives it a whirl.

Anyone who has used a computer for any length of time will have deleted something they shouldn’t have, had Windows play up or even suffered a full hard disk failure. It cannot be said enough, backup, backup, backup.

The ABSplus from Mountain Solutions is essentially a small hard drive in a case which can be attached to a laptop via a PCMCIA type II or III slot. The unit is available in a range of capacities up to 48Gb which ought to be enough for any current laptop out there. It draws its power from the laptop and neither needs or indeed has any method of external power. When not in use, the connecting cable folds neatly away under the unit and is held in place by clips making the whole thing about the same size as a longish packet of cigarettes. It weighs in at a mere 175g or about 7 ounces for us old people.

Installation is straightforward although the laser printed manual which covers most operating systems didn’t quite describe what happened when I installed under Windows 98 Second Edition. No matter, within minutes of opening the box, it was up and running.

The hard drive in the ABSplus is shipped in FAT32 format. If you use NT4 you may need to reformat it as NTFS before you start using it.

As well as the device itself, you also get backup software. When installed, this creates a bootable hard drive and creates partitions to match those on your laptop. It then allows you to do a full backup of your machine’s hard drive. After that, you can set it to perform a backup each time the ABSplus is plugged in or make backups yourself as and when required. To save time, you can use the differential option whereby only the changes since the last backup are backed up.

The software is extremely easy to use and with suitable configuration, its use can be transparent to the user making it ideal for corporate markets where end users may be less than IT literate, just plug it in and the software does the rest. For those security conscious people, you can password protect the contents of the backups.

Speed wise I got around 50Mb/minute on differential backups which was pretty good although the manufacturers claim a top speed of 75mb/minute. I could continue working whilst this ran although the machine did get a bit sluggish during this time.

Hard Drive Failure

Should the laptop’s hard drive fail totally, you can simply open the ABSplus and swap the drive there for the one in your laptop and be up and running in minutes – an excellent idea.  

On the other hand, if Windows is refusing to boot up, you can use the supplied rescue diskette which boots up a mini version of Linux and repairs the laptop’s Windows installation based on what is on the ABSplus’s  drive. The method for this differs slightly for different versions of Windows so be sure to read the manual carefully before proceeding.

Other Uses

Users migrating from one laptop to another could use the unit to copy their data between machines. By purchasing the optional USB to PCMCIA adapter you can also access the files on the ABSplus from your desktop PC, again helping with data sharing and migration.

Conclusion

The ABSplus is an excellent solution for backing up your laptop. For the home user it is excellent value for money when compared to tape drives of similar capacity. For business users, the ease of use and ‘hot swap’ features means an IT department can have a dead laptop up and running in minutes.

Iain Laskey