Instant disaster recovery for laptops and desktops is promised by two new products from backup specialist CMS.

The ABS Plus plug-in drives for laptops and desktops are preconfigured with Bounceback Professional 7.0, the latest version of the company’s backup and recovery software.

Sales manager Brian Blanchard claims that using the products entails little more than plugging in one of the boxes. It will back up your entire system, or you can choose which parts you want to mirror.

In subsequent sessions ABS Plus will back up only what has changed – but it never deletes a backed-up file unless directly instructed to do so.

‘This means it goes one better than Windows. You can list deleted files, and go through various versions of them, as if you are in Windows Explorer,’ says Blanchard.

If your laptop drive crashes completely you can open up the Bounceback case, take out the standard 2.5in drive and swap it for the dead one in your computer.

If the drive is still working but has problems, from dodgy software or a virus, for instance, you can plug in the backup drive and restore it to the previous healthy state.

ABS Plus notebook drives are available in capacities of 40GB to 160GB, with USB2, Firewire, or PC Card interfaces; the desktop model will also be available with a Sata (serial ATA) interface.

Prices start at £109 ex VAT and the software is available for £45 ex VAT standalone.

Blanchard warns that if you want to back up an entire disk you need an ABS drive of greater capacity because of the need to archive dead files.