Taking your data for a CD-RW drive

CD-RW drives offer the most flexibility to the user in terms of laptop back-up processes, letting them choose what and when they complete their data back-up procedures. Most major laptop vendors offer CD-RW drives as standard equipment or as an option. In our tests, we used Roxio's (an Adaptec spinoff) Easy CD Creator 5, which includes both a hard drive image tool and a data archiving tool.

But with flexibility comes responsibility. Recurring failure to remember to do backups is probably the main reason that most organizations go to some sort of automated system.

It's also a matter of time. In many cases, time spent performing those backups would be much better spent by someone in the IT department using central resources.

The lack of centralized management tools would have caused this approach to come in a distant fifth, had we scored the product.