Imation has been in the digital storage business for what seems like forever, and has a range of portable hard drives in different shapes and sizes. The Apollo range is available in capacities up to 320GB: the 160GB external drive on test here is just about pocket-sized and finished in a rough black plastic and chrome design. Aside from a blue access light on the exterior and mini-USB port, there's not a lot else to it, though you are provided with backup software pre-loaded if you need it.

The supplied USB cable features twin full-sized USB connectors at one end: one is intended for data and one for power. Allegedly this is for use with computers with limited bus power, and although we haven't encountered any issues with a straightforward USB cable before, those who own older machines, and have done, get peace of mind.

The software supplied is ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup, which is a straightforward but capable application available in versions for both Macs and PCs. From the main interface you can choose to automatically scan your hard drive to select media files such as audio, video and photos, personal documents from software like Microsoft Office, or your own hand-picked selection of files and folders.

You can add new categories to your personal documents selection and choose specific formats, and in all cases can opt to either perform a full backup or an incremental backup of files that have been changed from the original set.

A scheduler allows you to create a range of different schedules for different file types, and this can also be used to select a specific collection of files and folders for backup at any time. When restoring files you can either choose specific files or file categories, to retrieve an entire backup set or certain parts.

There's not a lot else to the software, but we found the use of categorised lists to be pretty effective. Restoring files isn't quite as helpful: since everything is stored in the original directory tree, both through Windows Explorer and the software, you have to browse around a bit to find the original location.

We set up a number of schedules and performed some manual backups and saw a relatively fast time of around five minutes for the transfer of a gigabyte of data. This is about what you'd expect, and priced at £59.99 for 160GB capacity it's also about what you'd expect to pay. Judging by the hollow feel of the casing, though, we'd have hoped Imation could make the thing a little more slimline, and it would have been nice to see a shortcut backup button on the exterior.

Imation's drive is perfectly capable but doesn't really offer anything particularly innovative. The price and speed are about average and the pre-installed software does its job well, but doesn't offer a lot more than Windows' default tools.