The story goes that the airbag was invented as an automatic alternative to the seat belt, because freedom-loving Americans couldn't be persuaded to Clunk, Click, Every Trip - if only they'd had Jimmy Saville fronting the ad campaign.

In much the same way, Clickfree is intended to take all the tricky bits out of PC backup. Plug the slick, black and chrome, 120GB Clickfree hard drive into a USB socket, the literature says, and the whole process works automatically.

This is actually a great idea, as even the most whizzy of backup software usually requires you to tell it which files you want backed up and where they're located. Clickfree assumes you'll need your Office files, your photo files, your audio files, all your e-mail and several other categories of data covering most people's needs, and scans everywhere on your PC for them.

More than that, the same drive can be plugged into up to 10 PCs and will back each of them up to separate file folders - unencrypted and uncompressed, so if you need to get at the files directly you don't need extra software. When you plug it back into a PC that has already been backed up, the software is intelligent enough to recognise the machine and only add new files to the correct archive.

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You can, of course, tailor the software, just like any other backup application, to look only in specific places or for particular filetypes, but with storage space so cheap you might as well leave the defaults as they are and go for simplicity.

When we initially tried using the Clickfree hard drive we didn't have immediate success. On each of the first three PCs we tried it with, it copied its program files to the machines but didn't fire up the backup software. It turned out each was for a different reason: the first was running Vista 64, which Clickfree needed a patch for, the second had been set not to autorun programs on external drives and the third had been connected via a USB extension cable.

Once we'd corrected these problems by downloading the patch, resetting Windows and connecting directly to the USB socket, respectively, each of the installations ran correctly and automatically backed-up the corresponding PC.

Back-up speed is on a par with other file archival utilities and the archives created can be viewed and files extracted from within the Clickfree front-end. Restoring files can be done on a file-by-file or complete drive basis.

Clickfree works with very little complication and, our minor glitches apart, lives up to its product name. Backup is pretty much click-free and it's hard to think of an easier way of securing your data, particularly if you use your PC primarily as a tool.

The idea behind Clickfree backup is a no-brainer: plug in an external hard drive and everything important gets archived. In practice you might need to make a few setting changes, but once it's running it's a great timesaver. For foolproof backup, though, you do have to remember to plug the drive in regularly...