There are cheaper ways to back up your data than with Iomega's Rev drive. Selling for just north of £200, and with a 35GB cartridge disk coming in at around the price of a 40GB hard drive (just over £35), it's an easy product to dismiss just on economic grounds.

And yet it stands its ground, and in use it goes some way towards justifying that price tag. It's a cartridge-based backup system, with the box featuring the drive itself - think around two thirds the size of a Zip drive - along with the necessary cabling and a 35GB disk. It's reminiscent of Iomega's old Jaz drive in many respects.

There's also the CD of goodies to get you up and running, which isn't a process that takes very long at all. You'll need to install drivers, but even with that, it wasn't long before we had a fresh drive letter to drag and drop files to. Our USB 2.0 unit then worked swiftly and with very little fuss, and we've no reason to believe that the SATA, ATAPI, SCSI or Firewire incarnations would be that much trickier.

Once the hardware was going, we installed the bundled software, which featured Iomega's Automatic Backup Pro. This application gives you control over your archiving decisions, giving you flexibility in the content and scheduling of your backups. It can also employ compression techniques to squeeze up to 90GB onto a single disk, although we'd argue that that's at the very limits of what it's capable of. To be fair, though, there wasn't the expected time penalty where compression is concerned. Norton's Ghost tool is also included, allowing you to create a backup image of an entire drive.

What surprised us the most about the Rev, when it got down to business, was the speed with which it operated. The box boasted transfer speeds up to 25MB per second, and while we didn't get that level of performance, it's no slouch and faster than you'd rightfully expect for a cartridge-based solution.

You then, of course, have the added convenience of taking your disk away with you and switching to another, assuming you have the funds to shell out for an extra Rev disk, and this is but one reason why the unit can form the basis of a strong backup solution for a small or home business.

Yet before you consider this review a wildly enthusiastic endorsement, let's revisit that sizeable fly in the ointment. Bluntly, the price is a worry, and it does leave the Rev competing with more capacious and speedier potential solutions.

Granted, it has real convenience in its corner, and once installed on each machine it's very easy to use, but we can't realistically claim that it's strong value for money. Plenty of merit, true, but when you add in the cost of additional media, it's a purchase you need to make with your eyes wide open and a real awareness of the alternatives.

A solid, reliable and robust backup solution, hampered by the expense of both the unit itself and the additional cartridges.