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Backing up data from a laptop has become increasingly easier in the last few years, mainly thanks to the falling cost of hard drives.

Even Traveling Software - now called Laplink (www.laplink.com) and the first company to develop a PC-to-PC backup package, Laplink, in the mid-1980s, has backup software called PCsync and PDAsync available. The real beauty of Laplink and its successors was that they worked over a variety of connections - parallel, serial, USB, modem, damp string - you name it, Laplink used it (I was joking about the string, by the way).

Mountain Solutions has tapped into another port on notebooks and PDAs, the PCMCIA slot, for its backup system reviewed here. Like its sister unit, the ABSplus, released in the autumn of 2000, the Fire & Forget unit is hard disk-based, but this latest unit squeezes a Toshiba 2Gb or 5Gb micro-disk into a PCMCIA Type II card. The card unit, which draws its juice across either the 5.5 or 3.0 volt PCMCIA power rail from the host computer, is about the same thickness as a PC card modem or Ethernet PCMCIA card. Unlike a PC card modem or similar, however, the PCMCIA-based hard drive is not as robust - you can hear the drive heads clacking around as you gently sway the card from side to side.

The company, thoughtfully, supplies a dinky blue carry-case with a rubberized interior and exterior edges, but care needs to be taken, else the drive will suffer head problems - or even failure - if it is bounced around too much. This is because the Toshiba MK2001 hard drive (in either the 2Gb or 5Gb versions), tiny though it is, operates at 4,200 rpm and has an average seek time of 15 milliseconds. At these speeds, a head crash, even if only caused by inertia when the card or its host computer is moving slowly, would almost certainly damage the data on the disk surface.

When Toshiba started marketing its PCMCIA card drives in 1993 it claimed the ability to withstand 40 times the force of gravity (40G), a force that could kill an ordinary human. When IBM launched its competing drives in the mid-1990s, however, Toshiba scaled down its claim to 8G, against IBM's claims of half that amount. Its claim of mean time between failures (MTBF) of 300,000 hours has stayed the same. These specifications, of course, are for when the drive is powered down - if the drive were subjected to, say, 8G while in use, it's debatable whether the drive head itself, let alone the data on the disk surface, would survive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, unless you're really rough with the drive card, it will stand up to more battering than many sub-notebooks take during their lifetime.

You can source a Toshiba PCMCIA card drive on its own for around two-thirds of what Mountain Solutions is selling its kit for, but you won't get the software, which really makes this unit fly. The software - supplied on CD-ROM - runs under pretty well all 32-bit versions of Windows from Windows 95b onwards, as well as Windows CE/Pocket PC, making it suitable for use with Compaq's iPaq series of PDAs. There's also support for the Apple Mac operating system (OS 8.6 and 9.x), and a version of the software for OSX should be here by the time you read this review.

Documentation is minimalist, to say the least, amounting to two A4 sheets folded in the middle to produce a four-leaf booklet with basic instructions. Inserting the supplied CD-ROM in the notebook's drive, however, reveals a 59-page Adobe PDF-based manual available on demand. There's no mention of this in the paper leaflet, however. The CD-ROM also contains a copy of Adobe's Acrobat Reader 5.0 - which this writer was amused to note auto-loaded, despite version 4.0 of the reader software being on my Windows 98-based notebook already. Thank goodness the CD-ROM didn't auto-install Acroreader 5.0 - at least it only ran from the disk itself.

The driver software for the unit is the same as for the ABSplus that SC Magazine reviewed in December, although the software has now galloped ahead to version 4.1. If the drive is present in the notebook's PCMCIA slot, the software auto-loads from the CD-ROM, as is normal under Windows plug-and-play, but the good news is that this auto-install feature has been extended back to Windows 95b, as well as to Windows CE/PocketPC and even the Apple Mac operating system environment. Nice programming guys.

With a top data transfer speed of 66.7 megabits per second (Mbps), a complete hard disk backup on a typical notebook (say 600Mb or so) will take about an hour. Time to plug the notebook into the mains. On a PDA, such as the HP Jornada, the initial backup process takes a lot shorter time. Incremental backups on a notebook PC are equally as speedy, and you can set the software to operate incremental backups in the background on a regular basis, such as every week. Power consumption on the drive is healthily low - this writer reckons a typical notebook's battery would run at about 50 percent of its lifetime when carrying out the initial backup. Incremental backups will scarcely affect a notebook or PDA's battery, although your mileage may vary.

Most notebook users will find their machine has two Type II PCMCIA slots as standard, which means that the device can be left in slot two and left to work in the background. PDA users, however, will need to slot the card into their machines whenever they want to use it.

Although Bluetooth devices might pose more interesting alternatives - using suitable software the data backup/synchronization could be transparent - they would be much slower than the Fire & Forget system, as Bluetooth typically chugs along at around 600,000 bps. This is only one percent of the speed of the system reviewed here and makes for an initial backup time of a couple of days with weekly incremental backups of 10-20 minutes or so. Looking at this the appeal of Bluetooth starts to fade, unless you're a gadget freak, of course.

At around $10/£15 a month subscription, Fire & Forget will pay for itself within a couple of years. One final word of caution about the product, though. Its PCMCIA card poses a security risk because of its sheer portability. Notebooks and PDAs can be stolen in an office environment and the size and weight of the PCMCIA card means it is very 'pocketable'. IT managers beware!
   

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