Ability is best known for Ability Office, the Microsoft Office workalike which costs £50. The company has now started to sell a series of products under the 'Essentials' banner and one of the first to launch is TurboBackup. The product is also marketed by FileStream and offers comprehensive backup from within Windows XP.

As with most backup applications, you can set just about every aspect of the back-up process, but for most people, the provision of Wizards for popular back-up tasks will be a big advantage. You can select pre-devised templates for things like the My Documents folder, all the photos in My Pictures, e-mails in Outlook Express or all Outlook-related files.

A back-up can be made to another partition of the same drive (not recommended), a second hard drive, a drive on a network PC or a removable media drive, such as a CD or DVD recorder or rewriter. The program can be set to report on the progress of a back-up or to carry it all out discretely in the background.

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The background option is particularly important if you're going to set up a schedule. TurboBackup includes a good scheduler, ideal if you have Windows XP Home, which has no scheduling facilities built in. You can set a back-up schedule from periods of months down to a few minutes and you can also establish a 'child, parent, grandparent' regime for extra security. If you create a lot of new work on your PC, the facility to back up My Documents every half hour or so can be very reassuring.

There are some eccentricities in TurboBackup which may cause irritation, like the program's insistence on creating a full folder tree to the destination folder. For example, if you're John Smith and you back-up your 'My Documents' folder from drive C to drive X (your back-up device), TurboBackup creates 'X:\Documents and Settings\John Smith\My Documents' - maintaining the structure - rather than a simpler, but less pedantic, 'X:\My Documents'. Still, this regime does make restoring lost files easier.

This is a flexible program, but that flexibility inevitably involves complexity. There's a wide range of options for the program itself and its backup and batch functions, and not all of them are obvious at first sight. It's best to stick to the Wizards and templates as much as possible and veer off into custom settings only if you have specialised needs.

Everybody should back-up their important data files and it's safest to do it to a removable disc or across a network to another computer. TurboBackup handles both of these and will back up as straight copies or compressed to Zip or proprietary archives. It works well and has a flexible scheduler built in. Good value and rightly an Essential.